The Black Rose Society

“You’ll become a gargoyle if you keep eating that stuff”, said Alexa without looking away from the entrance of Neutron, one of the most extravagant hotels in Electrica. Her vision was getting blurry from extreme fatigue and she could feel blisters forming under her feet. Needless to say her patience was running thin. Levi swallowed one last gamma, his dark hair falling into his eyes as he tilted his head to the side. “I won’t become like one of those crackheads who lost their souls to gamma and you know it. Besides, I’m nervous. What if he doesn’t show up?”, Levi said while briefly closing his eyes as the drug made its way through his veins, fuelling and sustaining his body modifications. He needed to increase the dosage in order to keep his newest acquisition: teleportation. “Tsk. Don’t jinxed it. He’ll be there.” Alexa extended her fingers in his direction and Levi gave her a gamma. The setting sun briefly made a shadow out of their touching hands, making them look like lovers, but Alexa quickly broke the bond when she lightly put the square jelly between her lips before swallowing it with annoyance. She hated that she needed to eat gammas every forty-eight hours to keep her 45/20 vision. “We’ve been tracking him for months now. If we don’t get it done today, the Black Rose Society (BRS) will relegate us to the rookie department and I hate training new recruits.” Alexa scanned the area for the millionth time in the hopes of seeing the spacecraft of Wyatt Hawthorn, the second in command of the Red Sparrow faction (RSF), land on the roof of the five stars hotel. Levi couldn’t agree more. They were both walking on a fine line after the election fiasco incident and that RSF business was their second chance of proving themselves to the counsel. If they succeeded, they would be back in their good graces but most importantly, they would be handsomely paid in gammas. Levi didn’t want to admit it but Alexa was right about the fact that he was starting to get hooked on the “jellies”. How could he not? In this galaxy and especially in Electrica, power was determined and obtained by body modifications. The more gammas you possessed, the more body modifications you were able to buy. It was a type of currency that was used in parallel to a more conventional currency: crystals. However, must people were not rich enough to pay the full price so they went to the black market where you could get the surgery at a cheaper price. Doing so was not only extremely dangerous (most people died during the transformations especially if they tried to obtain more than three modifications which was the body’s breaking point) but also punishable by death because it created an imbalance in the social axis. To keep those modifications acquired legally or illegally, every mutant had to eat gammas, the core of energy itself.

Alexa’s sigh of frustration pulled Levi away from his thoughts. Her silver lilac hair brushed against his elbow as she leaned against the wall next to him, making the dust twirl around them. They were in an abandon building a few blocks away from Neutron which was the perfect vantage point to spy and wait for their prey to arrive. “I can’t believe all the things we had to do in the name of our mission”, she murmured as to not wake the pigeons sleeping on the wooden frame of the collapsing roof. Levi couldn’t help but smile a little while reminiscing the past weeks. “Remember when we almost had him back in Nitrium with Moon Venom?”, he said, chuckling. Alexa glared at him. “I don’t know why you are smiling like that. It was your job to find out what body modifications he had undergone. I risked my life for nothing because of you.” “Well… now we know that he is immune to poison, that he has superhuman strength and that he can’t die unless he gets shot right between his third and fourth cervical vertebrae”, replied Levi with a rictus. He was going to add that he did his job quite well after all but Alexa suddenly put a finger over her lips. That only meant one thing: Wyatt was here. “Let’s go. Time to move”, said Alexa through telepathy. Levi nodded. He could only teleport himself four times every twenty-four hours in a radius of one kilometer. The plan was to steal Wyatt’s briefcase and kill him. He would do the stealing while Alexa would put her acquired knife skills to good use. The BRS didn’t give them information on why they wanted the second in command of the RSF dead. The fact that Levi was left in the dark didn’t really bother him. Alexa, on the other hand, hated it but she couldn’t just walk away from it all. People like her were called “Oxalis”; she was handed over to the BRS by her own family to pay off their dept. Since she wore the red bracelet, that meant she would be their property for the next two hundred years. It’s a good thing she was genetically gifted to fight even without any body modifications. “Five minutes.” Alexa’s voice rang in his head once more with a sense of urgency. She gave him a pointed look and he responded with a wink but when Alexa looked away he frowned. Was he losing his focus because of the “jellies”? “One minute.”

Alexa took her position in front of the broken window. Her heart was beating fast against her ribcage while she spun her favorite knife in her left hand. Wyatt’s spacecraft was slowly descending from the darkening sky to land on Neutron’s roof which stood at an impressive height of four hundred meters. A normal person wouldn’t be able to kill him from that distance especially with a flying knife but she was not ordinary. As soon as Wyatt stepped out of his spacecraft, she gave Levi the signal and threw her knife without a second to spare. She saw her target fall to the ground with blood seeping from his fresh wound, the air around him moving as Levi briefly materialized beside him. Without losing time, she took out her other knives and threw them in order to take down Wyatt’s bodyguards who were now fighting off Levi. It was a good thing that Wyatt was dumb enough to believe he was invincible and only had a few bodyguards to protect him. Within a minute, they were all dead and Levi reappeared beside her slightly out of breath with a grin on his face. “Look what I got!” Alexa saw that he had a metal briefcase in his hands and finally allowed herself to smile. Her partner was infamous for bringing bad luck yet somehow he always came back alive. “Did you linger on the last bodyguard on purpose?”, Levi asked, feigning being hurt. “I just wanted to pay you back for the Moon Venom incident”, she replied nonchalantly. “It’s good to brush against dear old Death once in a while. It keeps you on your toes.” Levi scoffed, but he wasn’t mad. He liked living on the edge. “Now all is left to do is contact the society”, he joyfully sang but before he could reach in his pocket to retrieve the orb Alexa stopped his arm. “Don’t you want to know what’s inside the briefcase?” Levi slowly shook his head. “No, I don’t. If the counsel's members find out that we defied their direct orders we will face more than a mere demotion. I will face imprisonment and you…you will have more decades added to your sentence.” Alexa’s expression became hard and almost cruel. Levi had never seen her look so scornful before. “What are a few more decades to me? You don’t know anything. I’ve heard things, whispers on the streets, about a potion that can grant you the capability to possess more than three body modifications. Do you understand what that entails?” Levi became livid. “No, that’s not possible,” he murmured. That would change everything. Wars, galaxy domination and the bloody quest of absolute power over every living being would be the future of all. “What if it is?”, insisted Alexa. “What if that’s what the counsel is after?” Levi’s grip on the handle loosened as his mind spiraled down a rabbit hole. With reluctance, he handed over the briefcase to his partner who hastily placed it on the ground. There was a digital lock on it with a timer. After three wrong combinations, the briefcase was set to explode. Alexa closed her eyes and took a moment to plan their next move. She had to be smart about it. One mistake would cost her life and possibly more. “Circe”, she thought. “If somebody can open this pandora box it’s her.” Gunfire and the sound of boots stomping on the staircase made her suddenly stand up in alarm. She exchanged a look with Levi. They had been found. Whether it was the BRS or the RSF didn’t matter anymore. “Take my hand”, Levi said with a grin. “I have one more trick up my sleeve.” When the soldiers sporting the BRS’s crest on their right arm arrived at the scene, only sparkles of dust and light swirled in the empty room where two mutants once were.