"Boom runs on brick, tripel, frites with mayo, and a festival the size of a city"
Kofi Mensah is a crowd-safety steward from Ghent, which means his job is to stand at the front of forty thousand people facing the wrong way. He carries a tally counter called the Klikker and an orange, round-tipped wristband cutter, and he looks at faces, never at the stage. This June he's working SOLSTICE, the fantasy-castle EDM festival in the clay pits of Boom, and he has won a sunrise slot at the hostel's silent disco, with the woman who books the festival's RISING stage listening at the back. His agency has put him up at The Wristband Hostel, an old brewery on the river where the dorms are fermentation tanks and your band is your key, your wallet and your ID. When he arrives there is police tape on a side door. The night before, a Dutch TikToker died in the disused Bottling Hall. The official cause is a scheduling fault.
The bunk above Kofi's belongs to Tanner Brooks, an American influencer who sneaks into things he hasn't paid for and calls it ALL ACCESS, and who within a day has made Kofi a viral meme: belgian steward thinks he's the FBI. Yasmin, a Red Cross pharmacist, came for something loud, stupid and safe after a death in Marrakech. Ola, a Polish penetration tester, reads everyone's wristband for fun and finds that the Hub has written a level that doesn't exist onto Tanner's band in the middle of the night, just as it did to the dead boy's. Nicole at the frituur says to stay out of the Bottling Hall even if the app tells you to go in. Then Inspector Anjali Naik arrives from an Interpol working group with evidence bags from Goa, Marrakech and Québec, refuses to download the app, and asks the receptionist for a key.
Nobody slows down. Tanner climbs the Main Stage's forty-metre Clockwork Sun and hangs from its eyelid in front of forty-five thousand people, and his hostel band lets him in places nobody should be able to reach. A guest is jumped from behind in the brewery's cold cellar with a length of wristband ribbon. And at two in the morning on the shortest night of the year, four hundred people put on glowing headphones in the old Brewhouse under two copper kettles and a rose window that catches the sunrise at 05:29. Kofi is at the green table. Anouk De Smet is at the back wall. Tanner is on the dance floor, checking the time on his phone.
Age: 23
Type: Crowd-safety steward and bedroom DJ from Ghent
Fatal Flaw: Counts crowds with a clicker, funerals included
Role: Protagonist
Age: —
Type: American sneak-in influencer, two million followers
Fatal Flaw: Has never paid for a ticket and considers this a personality
Role: Victim
Age: 25
Type: Red Cross pharmacist from Lyon
Fatal Flaw: Won't drink anything she didn't open herself
Role: Medic
Age: 38
Type: Goa police inspector on an Interpol working group
Fatal Flaw: Irons her shirts at festivals; hasn't downloaded an app since 2019
Role: Investigator
Age: —
Type: Receptionist and brewer, granddaughter of the last brewer
Fatal Flaw: Says every kindness like she's reading out a death sentence
Role: Keeper of the keys
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From Chapter 1, "Welcome to Boom"
The first thing to go wrong was Mateus's hand.
It was a little after ten at night, and the sun, which in the last week before the solstice in Flanders does not so much set as lean against the horizon and have a think about it, had finally gone down in a long smear of gold and pink over the far bank of the river. The courtyard was full. Fairy lights, bunting, the smell of chips. Someone had brought a speaker and was playing the Lost Frequencies song everyone in Belgium knows, the one that goes round and round at every wedding and every barbecue in the country, and a group of Mexicans who had never heard it before had learned the chorus in about four minutes and were singing it wrong with total commitment. Tanner was at the long table in the middle of it all, filming a tribute to Sjoerd with a candle and a cone of chips and a very long pause. Lachie was editing it on a laptop beside him in real time, cutting as Tanner spoke. Frankie—a skinny, sunburnt Englishman of about forty-five in a bucket hat and a faded T-shirt with a traffic cone on it, who ran the silent-disco headphone desk and who had come to Boom, he told everyone who stood still long enough, for SOLSTICE 2023, "for one weekend," and had simply never left—was explaining to a pair of Korean girls why his bar tab was, technically, a form of employment.
And Mateus, who had had three glasses of the hostel's tripel, which was called Boomslang and was nine point two percent, and who had become emotional, as he did, about Dona Capivara, was demonstrating to Kofi exactly how tight he liked his wristband, "like a hug, like my wife," when he pulled the bead too far.
Zzzzt.
"Ai," said Mateus, looking at it. "Ah. Hm. That's a very strong hug."
Kofi looked at it. The band had gone into the flesh of the big man's wrist like a string round a joint of meat. As he watched, the fingers of Mateus's left hand began, slowly, to go darker.
"Okay," said Kofi, "don't pull it."
"I'm not pulling it, it's pulling me!" Mateus tugged at it experimentally with his other hand. The bead did not move. "It doesn't go back! Why doesn't it go back? What kind of—this is a feature?"
"It's a feature," said three people at the table, including Frankie and one of the Korean girls.
Mateus's fingers were turning a deep, dusky purple, like a bruise, like a plum. He held his hand up in front of his face and looked at it in genuine wonder. "Look at this. Look. My hand is an eggplant. Kofi. Kofi, I have an eggplant hand."
Fictional reviews of the fictional Wristband Hostel, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "belgian FBI = Frites Bureau of Investigation 🍟🍟" — @brewski.bro
☠ "early arrival noted. all access granted. risk accepted. ☠" — @HostelReaper
☠ "you got in. exposure: high." — @HostelReaper