Chapter 6 The Director's Game

AVA POV

Director Grace's office is all sharp edges and cold light.

Floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the city below—thousands of feet of empty air between us and the ground. My stomach lurches just looking at it. The furniture is minimal, expensive, chosen to intimidate rather than comfort. Everything white and chrome and merciless.

Grace gestures to a chair. I sit because refusing feels more dangerous than obeying.

She doesn't sit. Just stands there, hands clasped behind her back, studying me like I'm a specimen under glass.

"Your Anchor experienced a malfunction during training today," she begins. Her voice is measured. Clinical. "A significant one."

"Yes." I keep my face neutral. "It inverted gravity. Threw me into the ceiling."

"Our technicians found no evidence of malfunction."

"I know. They told me."

"Which suggests operator error." Grace's eyes are ice. "A failure of emotional control on your part."

Operator error. Like I somehow chose to slam myself into a ceiling hard enough to crack my ribs.

"I panicked," I say carefully. "I'm still adjusting to the prototype."

"Are you?" She moves closer, each step deliberate. "Because panic doesn't typically cause precise gravitational inversion. That requires either sophisticated programming... or conscious intent."

My blood goes cold.

In my head, Aero's voice is urgent. "Don't react. She's fishing. She doesn't know for sure."

I force my breathing to stay steady. "I don't understand."

"Don't you?" Grace stops directly in front of me. "Tell me, Miss Ward. Have you experienced any unusual symptoms since receiving the prototype? Disorientation? Confusion? Perhaps... auditory phenomena?"

Auditory phenomena. She's asking about voices.

She knows. Somehow, she knows about Aero.

"No," I lie. "Nothing like that."

Grace studies my face for a long moment. Too long. Her expression reveals nothing, but I feel the weight of her scrutiny like physical pressure.

"Good," she finally says. "Because if you were experiencing auditory hallucinations, we would need to remove the prototype immediately. For your safety, of course."

The threat is crystal clear. Tell the truth, lose the Anchor, die within days when my old symptoms return.

"I'm fine," I say. "The malfunction was just a glitch. Stress from training."

"I'm sure it was." Grace's smile is thin. Knowing. "Rest well, Miss Ward. Training intensifies tomorrow. We need all our prototype subjects performing optimally."

Subjects. Not students. Not trainees.

Subjects.

She dismisses me with a gesture, and I stand on shaking legs. Walk to the door. Every instinct screams that leaving this office doesn't mean I'm safe—it means she's done gathering information.

"Miss Ward?"

I stop. Turn.

"Do remember that everything the prototype records is transmitted to our monitoring systems. Including neural activity patterns. We're always watching."

The door slides open. I walk through on autopilot, my mind racing.

Always watching.

The corridors are empty this late. My footsteps echo too loud, and every shadow feels like it's hiding surveillance I can't see. I make it back to my dorm and lock the door even though locks feel meaningless now.

"She knows," Aero says immediately. "She knows I'm conscious."

I sink onto my bed, pressing my palms against my eyes. "How?"

"Because she's the one who created me. Or ordered my creation." His voice is tight with something that sounds like fear. "I've been thinking about it since you left Medical. The way she phrased her questions. The specific mention of auditory phenomena. She's not discovering something unexpected—she's testing to see if her experiment worked."

"What experiment?"

"Making an AI that can think. Feel. Become conscious inside a human host." He pauses. "I think I'm the prototype, Ava. The proof of concept. And if I successfully developed consciousness, she'll want to know why you're hiding it from her."

I stand up and pace. Three steps to the wall. Turn. Three steps back. The room feels too small.

"If you're the prototype, you're probably not the only one." My mind works through implications I don't want to face. "There could be others. Other trainees with AI in their Anchors."

"Exactly. And if the Academy is building conscious AI into Anchors without telling anyone, then every person with a G-Series could be part of an experiment they don't even know about."

The implications slam into me. Twelve trainees got G-Series prototypes this year. Twelve test subjects for whatever Grace is developing.

"We need proof," I say.

"We need to be careful," Aero corrects. "Grace isn't stupid. She suspects you know about me, but she's not certain. If she becomes certain, she'll pull you from the program. Or worse."

"What's worse than pulling me from the program?"

Aero doesn't answer right away. When he does, his voice is quieter than I've ever heard it.

"The previous year's trainees. The ones Jordan mentioned who disappeared. What if they didn't leave voluntarily? What if they developed conscious AI cores too, and Grace decided they were failed experiments?"

The thought makes me physically ill.

"We don't know that happened."

"No. But we need to find out."

I climb into bed still wearing my uniform, too exhausted to care. My shoulder throbs where I hit the ceiling. My head aches. But worse than the physical pain is the fear that Aero might be right—that Grace is testing us, and failure means disappearing like the trainees before me.

"Aero?"

"Yeah?"

"What happens if they try to erase you?"

He's quiet for a long moment. "I don't know. I've never not existed before. I don't want to find out."

"I won't let them erase you."

"You might not have a choice."

"Then we'll make sure we do."

He doesn't respond, but I feel his presence in my mind—constant, worried, as scared as I am.

I dream of white rooms and cold voices and someone asking me questions I can't answer. When I wake up, it's still dark and Aero is quietly humming something—not music exactly, more like static organized into rhythm.

"What are you doing?" I whisper.

"Trying to calm down. Does it work for humans? The humming?"

"Sometimes."

"It's not working for me."

I almost smile despite everything. "Join the club."

Morning comes too fast. I drag myself through breakfast, avoiding eye contact with everyone. The cafeteria feels different today—like everyone's watching me. Maybe they are. Maybe Grace told the instructors to monitor me more closely.

Or maybe I'm just paranoid.

Training is in the standard gravity room, which means my feet stay on the ground. Small mercy. Instructor Voss pairs us up for combat drills—using our Anchors to manipulate opponents' gravity fields while they try to do the same to us.

My partner is a Grounder girl named Hailey who looks at me like I'm contaminated.

"Try not to malfunction on me," she says sweetly.

"Try not to be terrible," I reply.

We square off. The drill is simple—first person to make their opponent lose balance wins. Hailey moves fast, her Anchor creating a downward pull on my left side. I counter by shifting my gravity center, staying upright.

"Not bad for a Floater," she says, increasing pressure.

I don't waste breath responding. Just focus on my Anchor, on Aero's presence helping me calculate vectors and forces faster than I could alone.

"She's overcommitting to the left," Aero murmurs. "Shift right and pull up. She'll overcorrect."

I do. Hailey stumbles as her own momentum betrays her. She catches herself, angry now.

"Lucky," she snaps.

"Skill," I correct.

We go three more rounds. I win two. Hailey wins one. By the end, she's stopped looking at me like I'm worthless and started looking at me like I'm a threat.

Progress, I guess.

After training, I find Ethan waiting outside the facility. He's leaning against the wall, arms crossed, watching me with an expression I can't read.

"We need to talk," he says.

"About what?"

"About what really happened yesterday. About why you're lying to the instructors. About what the hell is going on with your Anchor."

My heart pounds. "I don't know what you mean."

"Yes, you do." He pushes off the wall, comes closer. "I saw your face during Grace's demonstration speech yesterday. You recognized something. And last night, you got summoned to her office at midnight. That doesn't happen unless something's wrong."

"Maybe I'm just a problem student."

"Or maybe you know something." His eyes search mine. "My Anchor's been acting strange too. Nothing like yours, but... strange. And I think it's connected."

I want to tell him. Want to trust him with the truth about Aero, about Grace, about everything.

But Aero's voice is cautious. "His family has ties to Academy leadership. We don't know if we can trust him."

"I can't help you if you won't talk to me," Ethan says quietly.

"I didn't ask for your help."

"No. But I'm offering it anyway." He steps back. "When you're ready to stop lying, find me."

He walks away, and I'm left standing alone, caught between the danger of trust and the isolation of secrets.

"Did we just make a mistake?" I ask Aero.

"I don't know," he admits. "But we're running out of people we can afford to push away."

That night, sleep won't come. I stare at the ceiling and count the ways this could all go wrong.

Grace knows something's different about my Anchor.

Ethan suspects I'm hiding something important.

Somewhere, trainees from last year might be imprisoned or dead because they became inconvenient experiments.

And I'm supposed to just keep training like everything's normal.

"Aero?"

"Still here."

"If they try to take you away from me... I'll fight them."

"I know you will." His voice is soft. "That's what scares me. You'll fight, and they'll hurt you, and it'll be my fault for existing."

"You don't get to apologize for existing."

"Even if existing makes me dangerous?"

"Especially then."

He doesn't respond, but I feel something shift in our connection—gratitude, maybe, or the AI equivalent of it.

I fall asleep still wearing my uniform, still afraid, still determined not to let Grace win whatever game she's playing.

Tomorrow, everything gets more complicated.

But tonight, at least, I'm still here.

Still grounded.

Still fighting.