"Kowloon runs on curry, neon, and a 1972 lift that has started counting heads"
Imani Clarke is a thirty-year-old Brooklyn litigator on sabbatical, up for partner, and severely claustrophobic ever since she spent four hours trapped in a lift at the age of eight. She has come to Hong Kong for one appointment: on Lunar New Year's Eve, a volunteer at a Hakka clan association in Sai Ying Pun will open a ledger and try to find the village her great-grandfather left in 1921. She has booked nine nights at Sky Nest Hostel, on the sixteenth floor of Dragon Gate Mansions on Nathan Road, and she intends to take the stairs every single time.
Sky Nest is tiny and lovely, run by Kelvin, a former flight attendant with a laminated smile, and wired to a little white Partner Hub called Siu Bao, Little Bun, which he proudly says "talks to the lift". The guests include Anni, a Leipzig tax auditor determined to beat the hardest escape room in Asia; Ollie Grant, a gap-year Brit still shaking from a rooftop in Istanbul; and Trent Wexler, a crypto founder who turns Imani's stair-climbing into a livestream series called Stairmaster Watch. The warnings pile up. Chidi, who fixes phones on the ground floor, says the lift has turned moody. It opens for nobody, eats Trent's bag strap, and flashes a thirteenth floor the building does not have. Ollie shows Imani an online thread of strange deaths in hostels, and she dismisses it as a numbers game: seven deaths out of how many hostels?
Then, on the morning of New Year's Eve, a new black box on the fire door locks the stairwell, and the app tells three different guests to leave at exactly 9:07. With her meeting across the harbour and the minutes draining away, Imani steps into the lift. It stops on fourteen for Mrs. Lau, seventy-one, her shopping trolley and a kumquat tree, and on twelve for Chidi and a box of phone screens. The lift beeps OVERLOAD, reconsiders, and confirms six persons. The doors close, and the lift starts going down.
Age: 30
Type: Brooklyn litigator on sabbatical
Fatal Flaw: Counts the exits before she counts her change
Role: Protagonist
Age: 31
Type: Crypto founder and livestreamer
Fatal Flaw: Mistakes a comment section for a cheering crowd
Role: Guest
Age: Early 20s
Type: Gap-year Brit fresh from Istanbul
Fatal Flaw: Vertigo Pro Max on the sixteenth floor
Role: Ally
Age: Mid-30s
Type: Leipzig tax auditor and escape-room obsessive
Fatal Flaw: Carries zip ties, a magnet on a string and no filter
Role: Ally
Age: 71
Type: Retired Star Ferry ticket clerk, 44 years in Block D
Fatal Flaw: Argues with lifts, and wins
Role: Neighbour
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Thirteen"
At 3:12 a.m., three days before Lunar New Year's Eve, Chau Ka-wing was carrying a bowl of congee up Nathan Road like it was a live grenade.
It was not a live grenade. It was a large pork-and-century-egg congee with extra ginger and a side of fried dough sticks, and it was the forty-first order of his shift, and it was going to the sixteenth floor of Dragon Gate Mansions, Block D, which was the worst address in Kowloon.
Every rider knew it. The group chat knew it. There was a sticker in the group chat, a cartoon of a crying dumpling holding a sign that said DRAGON GATE D, and people sent it when the app gave them the job, the way soldiers in old films showed each other photographs of their girlfriends before a battle. The app didn't know. The app thought Dragon Gate Mansions was 0.8 kilometres from the congee shop on Granville Road, eleven minutes including "vertical travel time." The app had never met the Block D lift.
Ah Wing was twenty. He had been riding for fourteen months. He was saving for a Honda Monkey, a stupid, beautiful, mustard-yellow little motorbike that cost more than his mother made in five months, and he was four thousand two hundred Hong Kong dollars away from it. He had worked it out: at his current rate, and assuming nobody tipped him ever again, which was a safe assumption, he would own the Honda Monkey in eleven weeks. He had a photograph of it as his lock screen. When a customer was rude he looked at it, the way some people looked at their children.
Nathan Road at three in the morning was not asleep. It was never asleep. It was just resting its eyes. The big neon signs had mostly switched off, the jewellers and the camera shops and the pharmacies with their towers of milk powder, but the lights inside the shops stayed on behind the shutters, so the whole street glowed faintly from within, like a fish tank at night. Red lanterns hung from the lamp posts for the New Year. A street-sweeping lorry hissed past, spraying the gutters. A man in a suit was asleep on a bench outside the MTR exit with his tie over his eyes like a blindfold. Outside a 7-Eleven, two Filipino nurses in scrubs were sharing a cup noodle and laughing at something on a phone.
And Dragon Gate Mansions stood over all of it, seventeen storeys of stained concrete and air-conditioning units, a building that looked like it had been assembled out of other buildings. The ground floor was a maze of shuttered stalls: money changers, SIM cards, curry, phone cases, luggage, a shop that sold only socks. At this hour most of it was dark. The smell was still there, though. It was always there. Cumin, frying onions, incense, cardamom, bleach, damp, and under it all a warm electrical smell, the smell of a thousand phone chargers and two thousand air conditioners and a building that had been plugged in since 1961.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Sky Nest Hostel, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Kelvin is an angel sent from heaven" — FreeToWander guest
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "The best hostel in Asia and I've stayed in 40" — FreeToWander guest
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Worth the lift" — FreeToWander guest
☠ "capacity check. 1 person. not yet." — @HostelReaper