"Tulum runs on cacao, sargassum, and gurus with better lighting than your childhood church"
Destiny Okafor has just finished eleven months as monitor engineer on a gospel star's arena tour, mixing the same half-step key change that makes twelve thousand people cry every night. She grew up in the AV booth of a twenty-thousand-member Houston megachurch, where she watched the ushers run the visitor cards up to the pastor before his words of knowledge. All she wants is three weeks where nobody asks her to believe anything, so she takes a work-exchange gig running sound at Hostel Ser Libre, a white-linen wellness hostel in the jungle outside Tulum, with cacao at dawn, a gong called the Grandmother, and a cenote the management calls a portal.
Everybody else has come to be seen. Dakota, a tender-hearted anime-club vice-president, is there to heal from guilt that went viral. Tavita, a newly divorced giant from New Zealand, is terrified of iguanas and cries at everything. Kyle, a laid-off mortgage broker from Scottsdale, has been picked last all his life, and he glows when Guide Soren tells him he has a big open path. Soren Blue is a self-deprecating Dane with a beautiful voice, and he reads Dakota's grief to the whole circle as if he'd heard it from heaven. Destiny recognises every trick, and he gets to her anyway. Then there's the little white disc on every roof beam, which the kitchen's Doña Conchi calls el aluxe and Soren calls the Oracle. Destiny never set that 19-hertz pulse, and it keeps coming back into her mix.
The warnings pile up. Iván Canul, whose family's land this is, has found dozens of guests' phones glowing on the rock eighteen metres down. Sol, a Mexico City guest who says she's in marketing, is looking for a Canadian girl who vanished after April's ceremony. Destiny finds a binder with the word VESSEL underlined twice, and a breathwork session ends with Kyle blacked out six metres down in the cenote. Every warning is gently taken as a sign. As the livestream countdown ticks toward Portal Night, the Wi-Fi password changes by itself to alwaysmeanttobe, the Keepers rehearse from the top one more time, and Destiny sits in the tech tent with her hand on a fader.
Age: 27
Type: Ex-megachurch AV kid turned live-sound engineer
Fatal Flaw: Can hear a key change coming three bars out, and still feels it
Role: Protagonist
Age: 29
Type: Laid-off mortgage broker on a healing journey
Fatal Flaw: Has never once been picked first, and would say yes to anything that picks him
Role: Victim
Age: 40s
Type: Failed office-chair salesman from Aarhus, now Guide
Fatal Flaw: Sincerely believes in his own lighting cues
Role: Space holder
Age: 21
Type: Anime-club vice-president on a guilt retreat
Fatal Flaw: Treats every push notification as a message from the universe
Role: Ally
Age: 25
Type: Cave diver and grandson of the land's owners
Fatal Flaw: Still says hello to the water, and not much to the people in white
Role: Ally
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Offerings"
The water was twenty-four degrees, like it always was, and Iván Canul went into it at eleven at night because it was the only time the cenote belonged to his family again.
He sat on the edge of the wooden platform with his fins on and his tanks clipped to his harness, and he listened. From the rim above him, eight metres up, the jungle made its night noise. Cicadas like a power line. A pauraque calling who-are-you, who-are-you from somewhere off in the chechén trees. The last of the swallows settling into their holes in the rock wall with small, cross, feathery complaints. Below his feet the water was so clear and so black it wasn't there at all. His torch lay on the planks beside him, off. He'd switch it on underwater. His grandmother said you didn't shine a light into the ts'ono'ot before you'd said hello, and although Iván was twenty-five and a year from a degree in environmental engineering, with a full-cave certification from a Swedish instructor who had personally found eleven kilometres of new passage under the state of Quintana Roo, he still said hello.
"Ba'ax ka wa'alik," he said to the water, quietly. What do you say?
The water, as usual, said nothing. That was one of the things he liked about it.
Somebody had nailed a sign to the post at the top of the stairs, back in March. Iván could see its edge from here, pale in the dark. He knew what it said without looking, because he'd read it every day for two months with the same feeling you get from a stone in your shoe.
PORTAL DEL ALMA 🌕
This is a sacred Mayan portal. Enter with intention.
No sunscreen · No ego · No phones beyond this point
Ser Libre ✨
It was not a portal. It was a hole in the limestone where the roof of a cave had fallen in, some tens of thousands of years ago, and let the sky into the aquifer. His grandfather had drawn water from it with a bucket and a rope when there was no other water for six kilometres. His great-grandmother had washed clothes on the flat rock that the tourists now used for photographs. It had a name, which was his family's name, because it was on his family's land. It had been sacred, Iván supposed, in the same way everything that kept you alive was sacred. Nobody had needed a sign.
He spat in his mask, rinsed it, put it on, bit the regulator, and dropped in.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Hostel Ser Libre, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "I found my TRIBE" — FreeToWander guest
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Guide Soren is literally an angel" — FreeToWander guest
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "the cacao ceremony made me call my dad" — FreeToWander guest
☠ "the moon is fully booked. one vessel pending. risk accepted. ☠" — @HostelReaper