She woke with a start, gasping for air as if emerging from a long trip underwater. It became clear fairly quickly that everything was somehow wrong. Her entire body was overcome by a vague, all encompassing ache. Her chest was too tight to take in a full breath. The air was thick and wet. Perhaps most concerning of all, however, was that she could not recognize the room she suddenly found herself in.
She felt around for something familiar, some sort of anchor, but none could be found. There was only the familiar jingle of the heart-shaped locket she wore on a bracelet around her right wrist. She sat in nearly complete darkness, save for the soft light coming from a large clock. The clock was counting down from twenty minutes, and sat on a small table next to a book of matches and a candle. With shaking hands, she lit a match and ignited the flame. Once her immediate surroundings were finally made clear she let out a scream. Bound to her by a painfully tight vest were three large, red explosive containers.
She looked at the vest then back at the clock. Panic began to set in. She pulled and pulled at the contraption until the skin on her palms began to peel and bleed. The vest, however, remained intact.
“Maria!” a familiar voice called suddenly from somewhere indiscernible. “Maria, sweetheart, you need the key!”
It was her mother’s voice, muffled, but there nonetheless. She couldn’t make out if it was real, or if she had begun to imagine things; perhaps imagined this entire scene.
“You need the key!”
“Where are you?”
“Listen, there’s no time,” the voice said. “We’re all in his game now. Look up.”
Maria lifted the candle towards the ceiling to find a small camera lens. The voice was real!
“Listen carefully,” her mother went on. “The vest is held together by a lock. We need to find the key. You don’t have much time left.”
Maria glanced at the clock. It now read just under fifteen minutes.
“He hid the right key somewhere in that room, if you look hard enough you could find it!”
“He? Who? Who is doing this?”
“There’s no time,” her mother spoke this time. “You must find the key!”
And so Maria began a clumsy, frantic search around every crevice of the room. She found one underneath the bed. She found another behind the bedside table. Finally, she found another underneath a loose floor board. Three keys in total; one silver, one metal and one bronze.
“Which one is the right key?” Maria asked.
“We don’t know, but you have to chose correctly. If the wrong key is used, the vest will detonate.”
Maria froze, her eyes fixating on the three keys. She looked at the clock again. Two minutes left.
“What do I do?” she asked. “Which one do I choose?”
“Pick the metal one," Andrew suggested.
“No, pick the bronze one!” her mother said.
“Forget that,” a new voice entered the scene. Her father’s. “The silver is clearly the one…”
“I think it’s the bronze one,” A new voice entered.
“Personally, I would choose the metal…”
One by one, new but recognizable voices would enter the scene. Voices she recognized from work. Voices she recognized from church, from the store down the street and from the coffee shop. Neighbor’s voices and teacher’s voices and the voice of her childhood friend. Voices she respected and others not so much. All the of them came together and crescendoed to a deafening tumult - an uproar so loud it may as well have been silence.
Maria looked at the clock, which was now counting down from thirty-six seconds. thirty-five, thirty-four…
The voices now indistinguishable, she grabbed one of the keys at random and felt around her back for the lock that bound her to the vest. Ignoring the voices above her still arguing, she closed her eyes and turned the key.
Everything went to black.
The crew tasked with dragging what was left of Maria out of the room searched and searched for evidence, proof, signs, anything to make sense of what had taken place. One of them noticed something shining in the rubble on the ground- a sprinkle of glitter in the dust. He bent down to unearth the object and found the locket that was around the victim’s wrist, rattling as if something heavy and weighty was hidden inside. He opened it and out fell a sparkling gold key, perfect and somehow untouched by the destruction.
What a tragedy, he thought, that she had been wearing the key all along.

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