The Tenants of 7C by Alice Degan

The Tenants of 7C

    Clare came to work every day feeling pleased with herself. She would walk through the glass doors wearing one of her carefully chosen, fashionably casual work ensembles, and look around the high-ceilinged, brick-walled interior of Stake Inc., and sigh with satisfaction. Only inwardly, of course; if you wanted to fit in at Stake, Clare had realized early on, you had to behave as if you thought you were really just a little bit too good to be working there. It was an attitude she didn’t find hard to cultivate.
    On that particular morning, though, she was having trouble. She sat in her car, scrolling through the list of locations on her phone, wondering whether she was good enough. You never got very many instructions at Stake, but even for them, this was a little thin. “Use your instincts,” Seevers had told her. “Consult the software, but don’t rely on it. When in doubt, go with your gut.” Which sounded like it might be an ass-covering way of saying that the software wasn’t any good. He had sat on the edge of her desk and waxed poetic about getting back to the basics, pounding the pavement, diversifying core offerings.
    So she was finally getting a chance to do field agent work. It was what she had been waiting for—but she had expected a little more fanfare when the time finally came for her to do it. Instead what she’d got was a confusing app that had slowed her phone to a glacial speed, and Seevers’ vague pep-talk. But it was fine. Maybe he didn’t think she was going to even get far enough to need real instructions. Maybe—probably—it was a kind of test. She’d show him he’d been wrong to underestimate her.
    The places on her list were all over the city: some were just intersections, others whole neighbourhoods. As she scrolled down again, Kensington Market caught her eye. Well, that wasn’t too bad. She needed to pick up some spices to make that Indian thing for the potluck on the weekend, and the Sobey’s near her apartment didn’t carry all of them. She pocketed her phone, decision made, and turned the key in the ignition.
    In some moods, Clare liked Kensington Market in a way that she found hard to explain. The grubbiness of it, the weird smells: it seemed out of character for her to like it, but sometimes she did. She found a place on an upper storey of the parking garage, and headed out into the market.
    The snow had stopped by the time she came out of the House of Spice with her black cardamom pods and fenugreek. She clamped one glove under her arm and fumbled with her slowed-down phone. It was a weekday morning, and cold, so the market was not very busy. Clare stationed herself unobtrusively outside an army surplus shop and scrolled through the settings to DETECTION — MAP MODE .
    After some moments of CONNECTING TO NETWORK and ACQUIRING DATA , she was finally rewarded with a map of the surrounding streets, and a blinking blue triangle that must represent her target. It appeared to be in the middle of a block; but the image was not very detailed, and couldn’t be zoomed. (Yep, the software was a piece of crap; Seevers had been right.) Though maybe it was showing her something that was inside of a shop or a house.
    She felt a small buzz of excitement as she set off down one of the central streets of the market, heading towards the location of the blinking triangle. This was real fieldwork, after all. Anything could happen. She was in the front lines now. It would have seemed more appropriate if it had been after dark, or at least a grey, overcast day, rather than unexpectedly sunny in spite of the cold. But you had to start somewhere. Outside a fruit and vegetable store she stopped to check her phone again. The blue triangle was still blinking in the middle of the block; whatever it was, it didn’t appear to be on the move.
    She turned the corner and walked until she had come level with the triangle on what seemed to be the closest street. She was outside of a very