Though dirty and full of holes, every item he was wearing from top to bottom and every item in his possession, from his North Face backpack to his outdoor-enthusiast hiking boots, was of the highest quality. At one point, when they stopped to take a rest, he folded his legs in such a way as to perfectly expose the label on the waistband of his pants. Aria laughed out loud when she saw the capital letters Georgio Armani.

Taylor and Luke stopped to see why she had laughed but she passed it off by saying “It’s nothing” and let them resume their conversation. By now, Aria had him all figured out. Luke was a rich kid who couldn’t do right by his daddy. Their high standards and workaholic tendencies had driven him to want to find some connection that couldn’t be found in his tennis matches or piano lessons. He obviously failed to conform to what his father wanted. So he got fed up with it one day and threw it all away. Aria felt no sympathy for him at all. To her, it was blasphemy for him to believe he even knew what suffering was. She could not shake the feeling of irritation she had toward him. She was glad that both he and Taylor seemed oblivious to it.

After a couple of hours, they had reached a part of the city that seemed to bleed into the arid nature that surrounded it. Luke showed them where to sneak through the chain-link fence and scrub trees surrounding what appeared to be an abandoned auto shop. Through the dark, Aria could just make out that the red and yellow stripes across its exterior had faded from neglect. Peering through the inky fog of night that had settled across the city, she could see that the large lot around the shop was cluttered with broken-down cars, many of which were missing wheels, hoods or other parts. Having not been washed in years, they looked like they had been salvaged from a natural disaster. Interspersed between the cars were a few tents and the occasional blue tarp, covering collections of clutter underneath them. There was no one to be seen apart from a boot belonging to one of the camp’s inhabitants that was sticking out from underneath a blanket.