Los Angeles is a ruined city on the far side of the Colony’s mountain country, visible in Peter’s imagination as part of a world that stretches toward an almost unimaginable sea. It serves both as a concrete landmark in the post-collapse landscape and as a measure of how much of the old world remains inaccessible to those who live behind the Colony’s defenses.

Setting and Distance

From the Colony, Los Angeles lies beyond the fireline, the grazing grounds of Upper Field, the dump, and the scrubby wooded hills. Farther still is the sea. The sequence makes distance feel layered: familiar working land gives way to ruined territory, and beyond that to a world Peter knows chiefly through maps and stories.

The city is not shown directly in these passages. It is a point in the landscape Peter looks toward from the Colony, and its presence is defined by what separates him from it. That distance gives the ruined city a double character: a real destination in the survivors’ geography and a boundary to what Peter can know firsthand.

The Road Through Banning

The route later described from the San Gorgonio Pass descends past hundreds of turbines spread across the flats like a forest of man-made trees. The travelers reach the old town of Banning, where the road ends; from there, they plan to continue inland along the Eastern Road for another ten kilometers to the power station. Los Angeles belongs to the wider geography beyond this route, while Banning and the power station mark the immediate stages of travel through the altered landscape.

This contrast places the remains of the old world alongside the practical demands of survival. Turbines, roads, and abandoned towns are not simply relics: they shape where the travelers can go and how they move through the country.

Peter’s Imagined World

As a Little in the Sanctuary, Peter learned about the oceans from a surviving book, The Oceans Around Us. Its worn pages showed maps and photographs; with Teacher’s help, he read the names of the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic oceans and understood that the world was round and that its waters were connected. Los Angeles lay in a world whose scale the book made visible but whose farthest reaches remained beyond him.

When Peter asked whether he could see the ocean, Teacher laughed and told him not to worry about it. Her answer leaves the sea uncertain to him—not because the book fails to describe it, but because his protected upbringing has made even the existence of the wider world feel debatable. Los Angeles consequently stands at the edge of Peter’s known landscape, a real ruin joined in his mind to a vast world he has encountered only through print.