Free The Tenants of 7C by Alice Degan Page A

tumbledown health food store, with faded posters in the windows advertising vitamins and herbal weight-loss pills. She looked at it doubtfully. It was the sort of store that looked closed even when it was open. If what was causing the blinking blue triangle was inside there, Clare doubted that it was really what she was looking for after all.
    But it wasn’t in the health food store. She walked all the way to the freezers at the back, and when she consulted her phone there, the red dot that represented her was still not quite on top of the blue triangle. Something behind the store, maybe?
    There was an alley down one side of the store, partially blocked by a delivery van which Clare had to squeeze apprehensively past. The snow had frozen into dirty ruts down the middle of the pavement, which was little more than a network of potholes.  
    She arrived at the rear of the store. There was another alley here, with the backs of stores on one side, and on the other a row of small, connected houses, totally hidden from the street. Some of them had been jauntily painted and outfitted with window boxes and lace curtains; others looked neglected and pitiful. Down at the end of the row, the very last house bore a faded sign above its front window. Clare walked down to the end of the alley and looked up at the sign. Heaven and Earth Bakery , it said.
    Compared to the Heaven and Earth Bakery, the health food store had looked positively welcoming. This place looked more than closed; it looked abandoned. The front window was half covered in newspapers, and there was graffiti on the door. But a smell of fresh baking—magnificent, irresistible fresh baking—curled out from somewhere inside the dingy house. And when Clare looked down at the scanner, the red dot was just touching the edge of the blue triangle. This was what she had been looking for.
    The door opened, with a gently tinkling chime, into a small, warm, crowded shop. It was furnished with a haphazard mixture of Ikea chairs and plastic patio tables with garish vinyl tablecloths. The only decoration on the white walls was an out-of-date calendar and a faded piece of weaving. On the whole, rationally, Clare was unimpressed. But the part of her that revelled in the dirty streets of Kensington was jumping for joy. The smell of baking in the air was so good it made the whole place beautiful. Clare threaded her way between the full tables of the front room to the doorway which led into a back room. Here there were a few more tables, not all full, and a glass-fronted counter crammed with the most luscious baked goods she had ever seen. It was hard to explain why they looked so good. There were plain cakes, with no fancy icing or chocolate shavings, crusty loaves of bread, and different kinds of buns. But you could tell, somehow, that it would all taste better than any cake or bread or bun that you had ever had.
    The app was now flashing an unhelpful icon like a No Parking sign. Clare pocketed her phone, hung her purse off the back of a chair at an empty table, and went to look at the cakes. A teenaged girl with stringy, unconvincing black hair emerged from a door behind the counter, hefting a tray of buns. She gave Clare a resentful look and clattered the tray down on top of the counter.
    “Do you want something?” she asked, with a thick accent that Clare thought of as Russian.
    Clare ordered a slice of cake for here, and tried to get a coffee but was told with an incredulous sneer that they only served tea.
    “I guess that will have to do, then.”
    “Sit. I bring it to you.”
    She sat, and tried to get the app working again while she waited for the unfriendly girl to bring her cake and tea. She called up INTERIOR MODE , THREAT CLASSIFICATION, and SHORT RANGE IDENTIFICATION in succession—not that she had any clue what they did—but all showed the same flashing No Parking icon. Piece of crap .
    Another woman had come out from the back of the bakery by the time Sulky Girl had