Nowhere Girl | The Darkest Minds Fanfic

There's a Place

I must have slept through almost the entire Arizona. Now it seemed like we had reached a totally barren plane, with only some mountains on the distant horizon. I sat up and tried to make out the surrounding in the twilight. There were no artificial lights, and the sky was the color of indigo, except for the band of orange above the mountains in front of us. The sun was already down, and the stars were still barely out, which made me feel like we were floating between two vast, dark oceans, one on top, one below.

　　There is a Japanese saying for this time of the day, oumagadoki, which means 'the time when one meets ghosts'. It was considered a bad omen, but I had always like this time of the day, and interpreted it as the time of day when you meet your dead love ones. It felt peaceful, slightly mystic, and almost magical. When I was in Leda Corp, I always imagined that this was what death would feel like.

　　After a couple of hours of driving, we finally started to see buildings. After another thirty minutes, Ang took us off the highway, and we started driving on the Las Vegas Boulevard.

　　It was a wide road, and that was probably the only thing that made it qualified as a boulevard. There was not a single shop opened, not a single sign lit, and not a single person on the street. The entire city just looked...abandoned.

　　"I thought there was sign here that said 'Welcome to something-something Las Vegas.'" Drew said beside me. "The something-something part was in cursive."

　　"It is 'fabulous', and I think that sign is in the south side of the city." Ang replied, eyes still on the road.

　　"How do you know that?" James asked.

　　"You guys remember how I used to go on business trips with my dad? A lot of them were to here." Ang answered. "Of course, the city looked much brighter back then."

　　"Are there no one here?" I asked.

　　"The casino business went down when the economy collapsed. There is just no reason for people to stay anymore." Ang said. "Which is good news for us, right? No skip tracers or PSFs would think of coming here."

　　"Yeah, I guess so." James said, "But there is literally no one here. Are you sure this is where we are going to find your uncle?"

　　"Well, I don't think there's a reason for him to lie to my dad." Ang shrugged. "We'll just see if it pans out."

　　We drove along the same road in a snail speed so Ang could tell one dark building from the other. The shadows of those buildings—no doubt were once hotels and casinos—loomed over us, cutting our vision into frames on a film roll. There were a miniature New York City, an Eiffel Tower, a discount pyramid with a fake sphinx, and a fairy tale castle of some sort scattering on either side of the road. I don't understand the mindset behind these buildings, or the appeal of replicating the entire world in a pastel color version.

　　We eventually stopped in front of a golden, cylinder shaped building right across the street from the pyramid. On the top edge of it, there were several cursive letters that read El Dorado.

　　"We're here." Ang announced.

　　"Will your uncle come bring us in?" Drew asked.

　　"I don't know." Ang said. "Maybe we should at least get out of the car so he'd know we're not strangers."

　　We got out of the car, and started checking the entrance for any sign of human activity. From the looks of it, these doors hadn't been used in at least a year; the sand collected on the thresholds probably already made the doors hard to open.