“Um,” the Boss said. “We’re going to the place with . . .” She looked over to the driver, then cleared her throat. The Boss was real clever that way. “We’re going to see about buying a few slices of pizza and talking with someone.”

“Oh,” Teddy said. “All right.”

The Boss smiled at her and placed a hand atop Teddy’s head to pat her hair. It was real nice, like a hug for her head. It got even better when the Boss started to absentmindedly fiddle with Teddy’s ears.

It probably made the Boss happy, too, because Teddy had great ears. They were her most bearlike feature when she wasn’t actually a bear, after all.

She wondered what it would feel like for the Boss to play with her ears when she was big. Maybe while riding her into combat?

But the Boss didn’t have any attacks that worked from afar . . . or from up close. So she’d need a gun or something.

Teddy didn’t know why she knew what an AK-47 was, but she did, and she wished the Boss could ride her into battle while spraying capitalist pigs with a pair of them.

“Yeah,” Teddy whispered.

“Hmm?” the Boss asked.

“Nothing,” Teddy said. “I was just thinking about stuff.”

“Oh, okay.”

Melaton looked up from her phone as the taxi started to slow down. “We here?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” the driver said as he came to a full stop and the car pitched back and forth a bit. “That will be eleven fifty,” he said.

Melaton slid a green twenty through the grating and stepped out. “C’mon, kids,” she said. Teddy unbuckled herself—belt buckles were, in her opinion, stupid, but the Boss insisted—and scrambled out on the Boss’s side.

The moment they were all out, the taxi clunked a few times, then sped off, leaving the three of them standing on the side of the road.

Teddy looked around. There was a meager field, with big bushes and long grass cut up by footpaths covered in cigarette butts to one side. It was squished between a row of homes with fenced-in backyards and the rear of what looked like a grocery store.

Closer by was a four-way stop with a cigar store on one side and a pizzeria on the other. She figured that the pizza place, with its nearly deserted parking lot, was their objective.

Most of the other buildings around were all little homes. The word bungalow came to mind, but Teddy wasn’t so sure that these homes were that kind.

She sniffed the air, then sniffed it some more. Sure, it stank of cars and trash, but under all the stink was a heavenly smell that had her moving toward the pizza place as if in a trance.

“Kid’s got the right of it,” Melaton said. “That’s the place.”