Alex's boots clattered through the deserted streets, breaking the hanging silence. The looming shapes of dead buildings seemed to watch him pass, dim street lights spitting out light. The air was thick and still, devoid of any scents - a fact that had taken Alex a month to notice, though his instincts had long since recognized the danger. He marched on towards his work, the only other sound a faint whisper of a wind he did not feel.

Occasionally he would spot another inhabitant, scurrying along as if clinging on to whatever threadbare life they had managed to keep. No one exchanged words, no one even met each other's gaze. Those used to socializing had long since learned to remain silent or disappeared. Even the slightest word could prove disastrous; an unthinking slip of the tongue could cost everything.

The sidewalk and shrubbery he passed was trimmed with unnatural precision, as it had been every day since the aliens arrived. It seemed surreal; Alex had yet to see a living being with a mower, let alone a pair of trimmers, yet everywhere there was a prickling neatness - trees pruned to perfection, shrubs clipped with mathematical exactitude. He could only assume it was done by aliens themselves, a fact that made his anger rise with each passing day at having to clean the inside of one of their buildings.

The anger was a constant hum now, growing stronger with every day. Before he'd kept himself busy, searching for solace in routine and detachment - but his spark of hope in form of a cryptic fortune cookie had reignited his feelings. Every stale act of cruelty by his oppressors felt like a fresh wound, loved ones gone without warning, fate still a mystery. Alex's dreams, way of life, his whole world snatched away all at once.

He could no longer push down the fire in his heart, and it had grown into an intense flame of ire. Each day stoked the embers, as did his growing exasperation. Keeping himself in check had been difficult enough already, but now it felt like scaling an unscalable wall. After so much time quelling his sentiments, he'd lost the ability to manage them. One slip, and it would all be set ablaze.

"Damn them," Alex mumbled under his breath, mixing in the words with an exhale of breath until only he would know some approximation of the words he said. He scanned his surroundings for any sign the aliens had understood him, petrified. It had been a futile act of defiance with immense risk, childish, stupid, and none of those facts had been enough to stop him.

The lack of sleep was certainly taking its toll. Alex had spend another night at the desk, foolishly pouring over the fortune cookie until exhaustion took him. He'd woken up in a daze and was fortunate he hadn't snoozed his alarm and returned to slumber. The aliens would disappear him from his bed if he was even a second late to his assigned post.

As he approached the alien government building where he worked as a janitor, the imposing structure loomed before him like a twisted monument of subjugation. Brutalist architecture and alien technology melded together in one grey concrete behemoth with razor-sharp edges lit up by neon-blue energy conduits that snaked along its walls. Windows of tinted glass littered the face like a hive of eyes, watching over the sliver of aliens' domain. The energy conduits buzzed with pulses of light and heat.

Alex walked through the entrance. His nose caught a pungent whiff of ozone and sulfur that cut the air like a wall; it was the smell of an electrical fire gone wrong, mixed with the acrid scent of burnt plastic. The smell somehow hung only there, in that step between inside and outside. He much preferred the stale air that clung to the walls inside like a thick fog, even if it had a steady layer of ammonia, with notes of the sharp tang of sweat and despair.

The door clanged shut behind him, locking him in a circular chamber. Everything had a sickly blue tone to it, like an old corpse in formaldehyde. The curved walls were cold and smooth, not even a crevice or crack breaking up the monotony. He felt the electric hum radiating from all around, making his skin tingle with dread. Every so often he could hear muffled echoes of distant actions, strange, dull thumps and loud clangs. Once he heard something…scurry…across the walls. Alex tried his best to erase that thought from his mind.

He stood in the small room, feeling exposed as an uneasy energy buzzed around him. He could feel the presence of something foreign peeling away his carefully crafted façade, the one every human crafted around themselves so as to be presentable to the outside world.

Alex took a tentative step inside, the floor beneath him eerily stationary while walls of the circular room shifted and slid around him. He concentrated on keeping his footing as he walked with the room, the odd movement made it easy to lose balance.

Eventually he came across a table with a daily set of cleaning supplies on it, and hastily donned them in order to prepare himself for whatever came next. There was no telling when the room would decide its journey was complete, and Alex needed to stay alert at all times or risk falling behind – with dire consequences.

The tools were strange, not at all intuitive or familiar to him like any cleaning supplies from his life before. Alex had managed to find a way to make things work though. He hefted a cylinder with three nozzles on his shoulder, the weight light but awkward. the first nozzle he'd pointed at the floor, a fine steam shot out, and boiled the ground, leaving no dirt behind, only polished floor. There was a round stone-looking object that acted as a rag for the table like structures the aliens had, but only if he squirted cleaner from the second, flatter-nosed nozzle sticking out from the cylinder first – otherwise the sudo-rock grated against the tables.

Once, when he'd forgotten to spray the cleaner, the stone had scratched against the tables, transforming its colour from an unappealing blue—to something more yellowish and sickly. He was careful not to make that mistake ever again.

Alex had no idea what the third nozzel did, and after his room had taken a week to turn from the yellow to blue last time, he wasn't willing to experiment.

Alex toiled away in the moving chamber, like he was the sentient belly of a Roomba. In the months prior, Alex had been complacent and unfazed by the mundanity of his tasks. A woman whom he did not know, and had not spoken to him, only motioned for him to follow, had led him to this place and he accepted his fate - cleaning floors and tables with no further thought.

Every since the ember had turned into a burning fire, Alex couldn't accept the banal tasks he'd been given anymore. His daily cleaning of floors and tables had taken on an almost oppressive air; he imagined scouring alien lavatories, cleaning areas dangerous enough to cause disease or cancer. It was a darkness he hadn't paid attention to before, one that now weighed heavily upon his shoulders.

He distracted himself from the thoughts, though convinced himself he was simply thinking in a more productive direction. His mind ran with thoughts of the cryptic fortune cookie message. "Mirrors can't eat people," the phrase echoed in his head, urging him forward.

A rare phenomenon occurred; something that had only happened twice before in the half-year since Alex had been tending this building. The boundaries of his room suddenly shifted the wall bulging and expanding in an instant to combine with another room, the result a ghastly combination of blue of his room and yellow hue of the one his combined with, forming an acidic green that was far more repugnant than the two separate colors. The two rooms paused as one, and would remain so for at least a few minutes, if the past was any accurate indicator.

Alex was in awe. There she stood, tall and in her mid-twenties, and yet he couldn't make out any of her features, transfixed as he was. She had her cleaning tank with her, pulled along by a draw string coming out of her tank's third nozzle. It followed faithfully behind her, just centimeters off the floor.

He'd been struggling with his bulky tank for years, without realizing there was a better way. With grace and poise, the woman simply yanked the string, which retracted into the nozzle, that then dropped down to rest on the ground. Alex felt like he'd just watch man walk on the moon.

He quickly reached for the third nozzle of his own cleaning tank and found a matching drawstring, a feeling he hadn't experienced in quite some time rushing over him; sheer elation.

Upon his success, Alex's eyes filled with tears. But the woman barely registered him, and he knew the feeling all too well. He'd acted the same way as she the last two times he'd merged rooms. Before he'd let the spark catch, burn into an ember, and been given the priceless gift of pulling his tank instead of lugging it.

He had two strong and battling ingrained reactions now. He needed to express his joy, his gratitude, to put these emotions out into the world and show the woman just how much what she had done meant to him.

The other was to remain silent, invisible, mute. Words were poison, they could consume you if spoken carelessly.

The burning ember in his chest saw an opportunity to spread to another, and in a deadly impulse Alex blurted, "Mirriors can't eat people."

The woman looked up at him, first stunned and then her expression quickly shifted from confusion to terror as she scoped out the surroundings like a trapped animal. She never said a word for the duration of their time together, not even daring to acknowledge Alex who kept his distance in return. Eventually the rooms separated, and the two went their separate ways, following the colors of their respective rooms.

Alex cracked a smile as the tank trailed behind him. This was a victory of sorts - one he hadn't seen coming. And that only made it sweeter.