"Dubrovnik runs on cruise ships, fritule, and a host who needs you to rate your stay"
Sofia Marchetti, 24, from the Sanità in Naples, is a FreeToWander Brand Ambassador intern with a smile that switches on by reflex, a lucky red horn from her nonna, and a real fear of heights. She has one month left to earn a contract in Amsterdam. Her assignment is the Hostel Pearl of the Adriatic, a five-storey house from 1512 built into Dubrovnik's city walls, a hundred and forty-three steps above the Stradun. Its live score is stuck at 4.71, and head office needs 4.75 in ten days. The Wi-Fi password means please, five stars.
Marko Babić, the owner-manager and a former water-polo goalkeeper, folds every guest a towel swan and makes his grandmother's fritule at four in the morning. He is keeping his family's house alive inside a city that has almost no residents left. Around him are his aunt Teta Vesna, who terrifies everyone; Temi, who is learning the Scrabble dictionary and refuses to rate anything; Barney, a retired Sydney ferry driver who has been waiting since May 2019 for them to fix the ending of Game of Thrones; a Stockport stag do; and Callum, the comedian from the Edinburgh snoring case, who has booked the one room with nobody in it. Then Chad Whitmore checks in behind a fourteen-inch ring light. He is an Elite reviewer whose verdicts count ten times, and he gives the welcome rakija one star on camera. The Hub upgrades him, for free, to the Rector's Suite Marko was saving for a good review. That night Marko closes his fist around a glass until it bursts, and smiles.
Sofia starts to see the pattern. There's a streak counter, a Smile Index, and a rival's leaderboard. Reviews get revised between two and five in the morning, and Marko's loan is tied to the number. On a boat trip to Lokrum, Chad goes overboard and Marko waits three seconds before he dives in. A policeman calls him a hero, and Inspector Anjali Naik, in town for a conference, is less sure. In Marko's ledger Sofia finds Chad's name, pressed so hard into the page the pencil nearly went through. So she does the only thing an intern can: she throws a party. Five Stars Under the Stars, with live klapa, free shots for reviews, and the score projected four metres high on a six-hundred-year-old wall. Chad has promised to post his final rating live.
Age: 24
Type: FreeToWander Brand Ambassador (intern) from Naples
Fatal Flaw: Smiles on reflex, and can't look down from anything higher than a stepladder
Role: Protagonist
Age: About 30
Type: Elite Level Twelve reviewer behind Chad Rates
Fatal Flaw: Always rounds down. Nobody's perfect
Role: Victim
Age: 40s
Type: Owner-manager and former water-polo goalkeeper
Fatal Flaw: Will fix your shower at 3:47 a.m., then ask how good, out of five
Role: Host
Age: 27
Type: Award-winning comedian, resting very hard
Fatal Flaw: If he hears a snore, he's out the window
Role: Ally
Age: 38
Type: Goa police, Interpol working group
Fatal Flaw: Keeps counting coincidences, and she's getting close to forty
Role: Investigator
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Shower Pressure"
At 3:47 a.m. she woke up because somebody was hitting a pipe.
Clank.
She lay in the top bunk of bed six, in the eight-bed dorm on the first floor, with her eyes open in the dark. The dorm was called Bokar, after one of the towers on the walls. It had stone walls a metre thick, one tall shuttered window, and a ceiling of old dark beams, and it was the coolest room she had slept in all summer. Somebody in the bunk below was breathing the long slow breaths of the properly unconscious. Down the far end, the old Australian man in bed eight, who had been there, the staff said, "since the last episode," was snoring very gently, like a cat.
Clank. Clank. A pause. Then a sound like a wrench slipping off a nut, and a single, soft, heartfelt curse in a language she didn't speak.
The noise was coming from the bathroom.
Above the dorm door, in the middle of the ceiling beam, a small white disc the size of a hockey puck glowed with a soft blue ring of light. Kirra had noticed it on the first night. It was the FreeToWander Partner Hub, and it ran the smart lock and the lights and the Wi-Fi, and the staff had a nickname for it that she had asked about and immediately forgotten. At night it cast a faint cold circle on the ceiling, like a moon that had given up.
Clank.
Kirra climbed down the ladder in her sleep shirt, with her phone as a torch, and padded across the cool stone floor, and opened the bathroom door.
The light was on. The shower was running. And standing on a small aluminium stepladder inside the shower cubicle, fully dressed, soaking wet from the chest up, with a wrench in one hand and the showerhead in the other, was Marko.
"Kirra!" he said, delighted. "You're awake."
He was a big man, Marko Babić, the owner-manager of the Pearl. Tall and broad through the shoulders, with the kind of long arms and big flat hands that Kirra had assumed, on the first day, must belong to a swimmer, and that had turned out to belong to a former water-polo goalkeeper. He was in his forties, with grey coming in at the temples and dimples when he smiled, which was always. He wore the same thing every day, a white linen shirt ironed so sharp you could have sliced cheese with the collar, and a tea towel over his left shoulder, like a waiter in an old film. The tea towel was there now. It was dripping.
"Marko," said Kirra. "It's — it's quarter to four."
"I know! I am so sorry. I tried to be quiet." He looked genuinely stricken. "I read your review."
Fictional reviews of the fictional Hostel Pearl of the Adriatic, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Location is UNREAL, you literally sleep inside the city walls 😭 Marko is an absolute LEGEND, made me a towel swan with a chocolate in its mouth and told me the whole history of his nan's house. Teta Vesna's doughnuts could end wars. Only thing: the shower pressure is kinda sad?? Like being cried on by a tired man. 4 stars, would come back 💙" — Kirra W. (Australia)
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "AND HE FIXED THE SHOWER AT 4AM. ICON BEHAVIOUR. 5 STARS" — Kirra W. (Australia), revised
⭐⭐ "bed bugs lol jk 😂 no but for real the stairs are a DEATH TRAP, 97 of them inside and like 150 outside, i've nearly died 4 times and i'm sober for 2 of them. doughnuts elite. aunt scary (respect). manager keeps staring at me like i owe him money. 2 stars cos the stag's paying 🍺👑" — Kieran P. (UK)
☠ "host delight: sustained. host exposure: rising. variable noted." — @HostelReaper