The gravity was weak that day, and as she floated high above the couch, Edward decided that she liked the change of perspective.
"Here we go!" Edward sang. "Mr. Billy Hypner! Wanted for murder and theft!"
"That's it?" Jet asked.
"He murdered the board of directors and stole a few hundred million woolongs from the company," Edward corrected. "The police have a reward on him, but family of the deceased have added some cash to the pot, as well."
"Good," Jet said. "Go find Faye and Spike. Tell them we've got a job." The man reached up, grabbed Edward's ankle, and he pulled her towards the floor. The Bebop's weak gravity held her down, but just barely. She easily leaped off of the floor and over the metal railing of the tall metal platform which stood on the far side of the living area.
Edward found Faye in the bathroom, taking a soak in the tub.
"Job!" Edward called.
"Don't you ever knock?" Faye sighed, but she otherwise didn't move.
"It's a big one!" Edward sang. She pushed herself into the bathroom, snatched a great handful of bubbles from the tub, and she set them in the air. They hung suspended in anti-gravity until they popped.
"Let the boys do it," Faye mumbled. "I'm relaxing here, Ed."
Edward recognized that Faye was in one of her moods. She was probably thinking about all the things she couldn't remember. Faye would snap out of it sooner or latter, and she'd wander into the common area to distract herself. Jet could tell her about the bounty then.
Edward left Faye to her bath and went to search for Spike. He was in the observation bay. He'd finished practicing his form and he now stood next to the great windows, a tumbler of whiskey in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth. The room was dark, so he was a dark silhouette against the universe.
When Spike heard the door slide closed behind her, he turned and raised his glass to her in greeting.
"Finished?" she asked, lightly pushing off the floor and towards him.
"Yeah, a minuet ago," Spike told her.
Edward watched a drop of sweat roll down his back between his collar bones.
"Do you like to fight?" Edward asked.
"Of course," Spike answered with a crooked grin. "There's something satisfying about crushing a man's nose under your fist. Sometimes it's not too bad to take a few hits, too."
When Spike took the cigarette from his mouth, he held it out to Edward. She took it and stuck it into her own mouth as she settled on the floor next to Spike's feet, her back against the icy bay windows.
"You want to hit a bar?" Spike asked. "We can fly over to the Century strip."
"Near the asteroid belt?" Edward asked. "Sure, okay."
After Spike had showered and Edward had properly dressed for an outing, the duo started towards the hanger. As they passed by the common area, Spike told Jet, "We're going out."
Jet only grunted in response as he continued his work on the computer. By the time the comment registered in his mind, the two had already taken their jackets (or in Edward's case, she grabbed Faye's) and continued towards the hanger. Jet only saw their backs for a moment before they disappeared into the circular hall. He blinked at the empty common area for a moment before returning to his work, a small crease now settled between his eyes.
Once they arrived at the Century Strip, Spike was quick to find a bar with a few pool tables in the back. He handed Edward some money so she could join a game, then went to the bar for a drink.
"Aren't you a little young to be hanging around bars?" one of the men asked as she threw her money on the pile and joined the game.
"Of course not!" Edward answered, although she didn't know if that was true.
"I think you are," the man told her. The declaration was abrupt, and it sounded accusatory, but he didn't act on his belief that Edward was too young for the bar, and instead he took his turn. When the man straitened and backed away from the table, he said, "You're one of those young kids, aren't you?"
Edward didn't think she was especially young. She was almost 18, after all. When she turned 18, she'd be old enough to legally do half the things she did already, so didn't that actually make her kind of old? It certainly did by her logic.
"I'm Charley," the man suddenly stated, holding a large, square hand to Edward.
"I'm Edward," she told him as she took his hand and returned his greeting.
When Edward told people her name, they usually gave her a funny look which Edward had learned was called disbelief (a strange concept to her), or they asked her to repeat herself. Charley only gave a simple, heavy nod before looking back to the game.
"You hold your cue wrong," Charley informed Edward after she had taken a turn. "And you didn't put the tie in your hair tight enough. It's about to fall out."
Edward felt the braid behind her back, and sure enough, the band was slipping from her hair. She quickly caught it and placed it more securely in her hair.
"Thanks!" she told Charley with a smile. "Faye would cook me if I lost another one of her scrunchies." Edward wondered if the expression "cook" was appropriate, since Faye certainly wouldn't eat her after she had been cooked.
"Is Faye the dark haired girl?" Charley asked.
"Yeah," Edward nodded. "And she doesn't like it when I borrow her hair things. I – Wait. You know Faye?"
"I've seen you with her before," Charley told her. "In a mall outside of the Ganymede gate, I think."
"Oh," Edward said, blinking. Then, she said, "Wow! You recognize me?"
"Of course," he answered. "You're not easy to forget."
As he spoke, he looked from Edward's bare feet to her cat-like gold eyes then to her wild red hair. Red hair was very rare, even more so than blond, and Edward's seemed especially wild and vibrant. No, she wasn't a girl to be missed or forgotten.
The game was fun. Edward's technique was still shaky and she didn't know the rules, but the bar's patrons were fairly laid back and even after Edward lost her money, they let her play around the tables.
Edward kept an eye on Spike, who struck up easy, meaningless conversations with the people who sat around him as Edward partook in her own strange conversation with Charley.
Charley was tall, dark, and quiet. He didn't look at Edward as he spoke to her, instead keeping his eyes on his game. He spoke very directly. He mostly made statements instead of asking questions, and when he did ask questions, it didn't always seem like he wanted Edward to answer them. He had a very abrupt way of speaking which seemed random and sometimes out of turn, but Edward decided she liked it.
After they'd been playing for a while, Charley invited Edward to go outside for a cigarette. Edward thought the invitation was strange since they were aloud to smoke in the bar, but someone had just paid the music maker to play a particularly obnoxious song for the third time that evening, and Edward jumped at the excuse to get away from the senseless noise.
Charley walked to stand under a lamp post, and Edward sat on the curb next to him as he lit her cigarette, then his own.
"So why do you hang around Spike Spiegel?" Charley suddenly asked.
Edward looked up at Charley, but his eyes were fixed on the closed restaurant across the street.
"You know Spike?" Edward asked.
"Everyone knows Spike," he answered shortly. "And you're hanging out with him. For what?"
"Well … I live with him," Edward answered. "What do you-"
Charley suddenly reached down, roughly grabbed the back of Edward's neck, and he threw her into the street. A moment latter, gunshots were ringing through the air, glass was breaking, and people were yelling.
Edward covered her head with her arms even as she was identifying the different guns sounding off. There was a semi-automatic, she heard a couple of cheep pistols, someone else had a machine gun – but there. Even among the other shots, Edward recognized Spike's Jericho.
Then, the machine gun was gone, Edward no longer heard the pistols, and then Spike was jumping through a broken window and into the street.
"Ed!" he called. "Edwar-" when he spotted her in the street, Spike rushed forward and roughly grabbed her arm, pulling her off the ground. "-crawling with syndicate goons," he was saying as he urged Edward to run. "Go!" he commanded as a few gunmen followed Spike into the street.
"No, this way!" Charley called as he pushed past Spike and into an alley.
Spike knew they were in a tight spot. The Century Strip was relatively small – only about 20 square blocks. It would be difficult to outrun the men and it would be even more so after they called for reinforcements. The only way he saw of getting out unharmed would be to make it to his mono-racer or disappear in the underground circuitry of the space port, which could lead to a whole other mess of navigating the wires and engine, then getting back out and possibly running into the syndicate again.
Therefore, he chose option number three and followed the stranger.
They only ducked around two corners before the man rushed into an unlocked garage and led them into an apartment complex.
The trio relaxed once they were in the elevator and on their way to the eighth floor, where Charley had an apartment.
"What did you do?" Edward asked Spike.
A smile curled at Spike's lips. He recognized that Edward was learning quickly: when things went wrong, it was usually Spike's fault. Faye and Jet were always quick to point fingers at him when guns went off, and now Edward was catching on, as well.
"This time, I only choose the wrong bar," he told Edward. "That place was a hangout for a local syndicate, and when they saw me, they recognized me and assumed the worst." Spike turned his suddenly sharp eyes to Charley. "So what were you doing there?"
"Infiltration," Charley answered, raising his dark eyes to meet the other man's. His head lowered and he rounded his shoulders, as if expecting a blow. "I'm a chimney sweep."
Spike's spine straitened and he shoved his hands in his pockets. Despite his occupied hands, Edward knew and recognized this stance. Like Charley, Spike was preparing for a fight.
"What's a chimney?" Edward asked. As a homeless child without having ever lived in a house, Edward didn't know much about architecture or indoor fires. Maybe she had seen the remnants of a chimney when she slept in an old, dilapidated building, but there was no one around to tell her that a chimney was what she saw.
Spike had grown up on Mars, though. He had visited many houses and apartments which had chimneys. However, he'd also played the syndicate game, so he knew that a chimney sweep didn't have anything to do with cleaning soot. "Chimneys are syndicate bank accounts, designed to funnel and hide money," he told Edward, his eyes still on Charley. "A chimney sweep is someone who steals the money from these accounts and therefore from the syndicates."
Edward blinked. She knew exactly what Spike was talking about. She had run across the money webs countless times while floating in cyberspace. The webs were intricate, complex, and often a beautiful mess. If they'd been anything interesting, Edward would have had a fun time pulling the webs apart whenever she came across them, but since they were only made of money and not information, she didn't waist her time.
Spike was eyeing Charley. "What the fuck are you doing talking to civilians? What are you doing talking with kids?"
"Why not?" Charley asked. "I knew who you were the second you walked into the bar. Everyone did. I knew how this night would end."
Spike's eyes flickered to Edward. She had been the first thing he'd thought of when the gunfire started. When he hadn't seen her at the pool tables, a horribly crystal clear memory flickered across his eyes, and his heart had nearly stopped. He knew what happened to women when low-level syndicate thugs got a hold of them. He preferred that the kid get shot up. Therefore, he'd been relieved to find her in the street, outside the bar and ducking under the stray bullets whizzing out of the broken windows. Spike had calmed a little – only a little – when he realized that Charley had made sure she was outside when the fight began.
Spike knew that he couldn't completely relax near the chimney sweep, though.
"How many syndicates have you knocked over?" Spike asked. Chimney sweeps usually had to work for five or six years to infiltrate the syndicates, earn respect and trust, and then come up with a fool proof plan to take the money and run without being caught or killed. The work was worth it, though, if the thief didn't die while trying to rise through the ranks. If everything went well, the sweeper could make it out with an ass-load of money, and the syndicates couldn't call the police since it was dirty money the sweep was stealing to begin with. The syndicates could only send their own men after the sweep, and by that time the thief knew enough about the organization to predict and counteract their attacks. Still, chimney sweeping was a very, very dangerous trade, and after a sweeper had been through a couple syndicates, they began collecting collateral enemies.
"I have plenty of experience," Charley answered with a long, even stare.
Spike believed him. Charley seemed like the kind of man who would be good at quickly rising through the ranks of a syndicate and then taking care of himself after he had ripped the organization apart. Spike decided it was the man's eyes and the way he held his chin which made him powerful.
And that made Charley all the more dangerous to be around. The chimney sweep was clearly a force to be reckoned with, sure, but the more syndicates he'd ripped off, the more people would be after him. Even standing in an elevator with the man was a risk.
However, Spike recognized that Charley had helped them out of a tight situation, and Edward seemed to get along with the man… Spike had seen the two talking while they played pool at the bar. He had recognized the bright, toothy smile Edward only gave people who she thought were interesting.
"How do you follow those webs without a computer?" Edward asked aloud.
Neither man understood what the girl was talking about. Spike sighed, but Charley didn't seem perturbed by Edward's sudden and out-of-place question. In that moment, Spike understood how the two nearly-strangers had been so immediately drawn to each other.
"It's blown," Charley finally finished with a sigh, pushing the computer away from himself and giving the monitor a deep scowl.
"How long have you been working with this syndicate?" Edward asked, pulling at the man's computer so she could peer at his work.
"Only six months," Charley answered, his eyes unwavering as he watched Edward roam through the files.
"How long would the job usually take?"
"A small fry organization like this only takes a year or two. It's the large syndicates which take time."
"Huh," Edward hummed as she stared at the screen. She recognized the lines of numbers and codes which were sprawled out before her eyes. She'd often seen them from a different vantage point inside cyberspace. "You know, it's a waste to let half a year's work go to waste. I can have this fixed up and drained in an hour!"
"Drained?" Charley asked as one eyebrow rose in interest, but his scowl remained unchanged.
"Drained of every last woolong!" Edward promised, her fingers already picking away at the web.
Spike probably wouldn't have agreed to helping the chimney sweep, if he were there. He wasn't, though. He was keeping an eye out for syndicate goons, and as so as he gave the go ahead, he and Edward would make a dash for his Swordfish. And since Spike wasn't there, Edward was glad to give Charley a hand.
As Charley had explained, the syndicate was small, and so was their web. Whenever she pulled at a string, several were knocked loose. Soon, a path was cleared, and Edward only had to encode a mask of security over the bank account so the syndicate couldn't trace the money to Charley.
"Tell me what you're doing," Charley demanded as he peered over Edward's shoulder.
"I'm filling out a fake business license for a transporting business on Io," Edward answered.
"Nothing can be transported on Io," Charley informed her.
"That's why you get so much money for it," Edward answered. "Plus, if the syndicate traces the money to this account, their attempt to access the paperwork to see who owns and runs the business is a clear early warning to move the money."
"I need this level of security on several other accounts, as well," Charley briskly told her, his sudden change of attitude reminding her of Jet when he was trying to negotiate the price for a Bebop part.
"If you have several accounts, why are you robbing these little guys?"
"It keeps me in shape for the long jobs. Everyone needs to practice their art."
Edward understood that logic well. Only a small fraction of her time net diving was spent doing anything productive. But cyberspace was what she did so she made sure to do it often.
Spike reentered the apartment from the hallway. "Pick up, Edward," he demanded. "We have an opening."
Edward hurried to stand and follow Spike from the apartment. To Charley, she said, "Thanks for helping us get away from the syndicate. I'll finish the job once we're safe." Her words were rushed as she grabbed her jacket and followed after Spike.
The escape was fun, like many of the adventurous escapes Edward had experienced before. Maybe it was because there wasn't any real danger. No one was pointing guns at them or chasing them. They just had to get away from the Century Strip before someone saw them out of the corner of their eye and sounded an alarm. Or maybe it was because the escape was easy, familiar. Spike had told her things were easier when they were familiar, and the two were running like she'd often run from the police on Earth. Or maybe it was fun because as they grew closer to Spike's monoracer, the man grabbed her hand, urging her to run faster so they could make a quick escape.
Whatever the reason, Edward liked running with Spike.