But…who are you, then?” Her mind reeled. Everything she had previously known was in tatters. A new world of possibility opened up before her. What was this room, her room, doing here? How was this possible?

“I will explain…in time. For now, you need only know that we are a group called the Keys. We are not what you expect.”

Jo felt as if she had been hit in the head with a brick. The man before her smiled and put his hand gently on her shoulder. His touch was soft and again, despite the panic alarms erupting in her brain, she did not feel any threat from him or the other two men.

“The Keys,” she murmured to herself. “But…” The man laughed again, quietly, as if amused by her confusion. He steered her through the door and into the room.

It was impossible. This was her room. Her clothes lay scattered in piles where she had let them accumulate; her towel from the morning shower lay rumpled on her bed. Her things. How were they possibly here, and in the exact places she had left them? Jo let out a groan of frustration and let herself sink down onto the bed. Only the bed was no longer there.

With a muted thud, she landed on the floor where the bed had stood. “What the hell is going on?” she demanded as she quickly stood up and faced him. Her voice rose with a swell of anger. “I followed you here after I found a blank document in my classified information only to find a replica of my room with my stuff in it and now it’s turning bloody invisible. Tell me what the fuck is going on!”

“Ah,” he began, another infuriating smile playing on his lips. “Once again, things are not how they seem, yes?” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of thin plastic with a blue dot in the center. He pressed the dot against his thumb and the bed once again became visible. She looked at him incredulously. “Go ahead, I assure you it’s quite real.”

Approaching it with caution, she extended her hand and with one finger poked the bedspread. It remained visible and felt real enough. “This is too much,” she muttered as she sat down on the mattress. It remained firm under her. “Please. Just tell me where I am. I want to know why all my things are here. And why they’re disappearing.”

“Ah, yes…well, technically, it will take a long time for me to explain all that so—” She glared at him. “Yes, all right, I’ll start at the beginning.”

“Good.”

He motioned for the other two men to leave the room. They walked silently out the door and shut it behind them. He sat with a slow exhale on the bed next to her. “My name is William.” He paused. “William Browning. I once held your position in the government security association, if you’d believe it.”

“Mr. Browning, perhaps you did not hear me.” Her brown eyes flashed. “Where am I?”

“Fine, fine. I’ll get right to it then.” He sat up and placed his hands on his knees. “The Keys are an organization made up of ex-government members. We were all part of the Educated. Using our various jobs and the privileges we had, we had free access to government materials. We took them all, we copied them, we put them back. Easy. We now have access to the entire base of confidential governmental material.”

“You copied it all? Why?”

His face grew stern. “The government is going to fail, whether you admit it or not. It is cracking from within; the pressure in the city is too great. The time has come for someone to take control of things and monitor the city. Now that we control information, we are able to do that.”

“Right.” Jo took a deep breath. “So you have access to everything we’ve got. Fine. How did you copy the entire archive of confidential material? There are over three hundred million documents in there, not including photographs, emails, and hard drives. We’ve only just started to archive all the digital technology and—”

“Mirrors.”

“What the fuck do you mean, mirrors?”

“Mirrors are the technology by which we are able to copy large amounts of information for our own uses. You ask how we can copy that many documents? It’s quite simple. We can copy anything we want.”

“Anything? Meaning what?”

He made a small gesture with his hands, indicating the room around him. “Anything. This room is a copy. The library I led you through is a copy. This shirt,” he picked up a red t-shirt that was lying nearby, “is a copy of one of your shirts.” Her face remained blank. “We are able, with only one point of access to any room, to copy it, save it, and re-access it at will, whenever and wherever we want. The kicker is,” he said as he stood and tossed the shirt on the ground, “that we are able to exist within the room as if it was the real thing. We will walk out of this room, your room, and be back in the hallway of a building you have never entered before in your life.”

“How?” she whispered.

“This key you saw me use,” he said as he pulled the small gold key out from under his shirt, “is the access key. There are only five in existence. With it, I’m able to put it into any existing lock, open the door and the room I enter becomes the one I desire it to be. I only have to use this card to select what I want.” He pulled out the thin plastic card he had used before, only this time the dot had turned a bright shade of red. “It reads my thumb print and then whatever room I need appears before me as soon as the key is turned.”

Jo let out a slow exhalation of breath. “Yes, that’s all well and good, but how do you explain— ”

“Ah, yes—it is called ‘mirror’ technology for good reason. I’m sure you remember that as soon as you entered and attempted to touch the bed, it disappeared?”

“Yes, I believe I recall that,” she replied with a frown.

“Well, that is because whatever we copy remains a mirror image of the original. It is only a reflection. It looks the same, only it cannot be touched or altered until I plug into the system and access it. We retain the physical date of the room in our servers and are able to retrieve it when we are plugged in. When I pressed the blue button, the room became real.”

She rose slowly from the bed and looked at him. His eyes were a light shade of blue and seemed to grow paler the longer she focused on them. “Interact with it? Meaning you can touch the things in it?” He opened his mouth to speak but she continued. “But how did you get into my room this morning? You assaulted me. You held me to the bed.”

He coughed and put his hands in his pockets. “We accessed your room from this location this morning, and pleasantly, found you at home. An interesting twist, you see. With the key, you can access any room and interact with the things in it. And the people in it.”

The wind felt pleasant on Jo’s face as she made her way back down the convoluted route of alleys through which Browning had led her. She had spent nearly eight hours in his company and the sun was beginning its descent. The city was stained a pale gold. Curfew was nearing and the streets which were bustling hours before were nearly empty. The confusion and frustration she had experienced upon Browning’s revelations to her had vanished and was replaced by a resolute sense of purpose.

The Keys knew everything that had occurred between the Lawyers and the Police and were making preparations to intervene. The security association was being used as a pawn in the investigation; her participation in the operation would compromise her status as an agent, but she had committed herself. During their meeting, Browning revealed that the Keys had been watching her for weeks and they were the ones who arranged her lodging in the compound, not the government. When she had asked why, his reply gained her permanent trust: “I protected your father when he worked in the association and I shall protect you now.”

The mission was set to start the following day. When Jo awoke, Browning was already waiting for her outside her room. The two men who had been with him in the mirror of her apartment were present as well but they remained silent.

“Did you get here through the mirror or did you actually walk?” she asked.

“No, today I walked. Good for the old heart,” he replied. “Hurry up and get dressed. We have a lot to cover.”

Later that day, Jo’s head was buzzing with everything Browning had told her, but she had no time to think about it. She found herself following him through a maze of shadowy underground tunnels that he said led to the center of operations. “But wasn’t that where you took me yesterday?” she asked.

Browning laughed and said, “No, that was just my house. I told you, the access key allows me to enter any room from any existing doorway. Where I am taking you now is more advanced than any facility currently run by the government.”

“Even the security association?” she asked.

They continued walking for a moment before he responded. “We can monitor every member of the Lawyers to find out about their deals, their bribes, who has infiltrated where, and who they intend to kidnap next. In some cases, we send our agents into the very rooms they are in to follow them. This is how we’ve uncovered almost their entire network of offices and holdings. They are spread across every part of the city, like a virus. We know who they are, we know when they move, we know where they’re going. Does the security agency know those things?”

Jo didn’t answer. She felt a sudden chill run down her spine and she slowed her pace, falling behind him. Until that moment, she had not acknowledged the urgency of the threat that the Lawyers posed. The security agency suddenly seemed trivial and ineffective. She barely knew anything about the operation of the Lawyers, and she had no experience with the technology the Keys possessed.

“Why me?” she asked, quietly.

He stopped walking and turned to look at her. “We only have one more location to find and it is by far the most important. When we locate the headquarters of the Lawyers, we will have uncovered their entire network and we will be able to stop them.”

“That doesn’t answer my question…why do you need my help?”

“You are the only one who knows where it is,” he replied and then turned and continued down the tunnel.

To be continued...