CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ELIZABETH
WE SIT ON THE HILLSIDE, our eyes fixed to the view.
My head is too full to appreciate the evening beauty. Mateo had me meet so many people and explore so many essentially-finished rooms; I can’t keep my head on straight. I’m exhausted. It was late morning when I arrived. With all the grounds tours that came with my whirlwind, I’ve probably hiked five miles — and that doesn’t count my excursion to the caverns with Aurora.
I look over at Mateo. He smiles, and so do I, then we revel in silence while watching the setting sun. It’s almost like my mom is sitting with us. Technically, she’s around the corner underneath her little white cross — but now she’s on the campus of The Pike and in every fiber of this place. Like she always was. As my father was, and my grandfather before him. As we all will be, forever, thanks to Mateo.
“He loves you so much,” Aurora told me during our hike.
I sighed.
“You don’t believe me.”
I shrugged. “It’s not that I don’t believe you. It’s that we’re so different.”
She stopped. I had to stop to stay with her. Aurora smiled before she spoke. I know she’s around my age, but she seems so young. With the tilted sunlight glinting through her blonde hair, she almost seems like a teenager. She has narrow eyes and narrow lips. A curious but stunning breed of beauty.
“Have you met my husband?” she asked me.
“No.”
“He’s unique, to say the least. He has very few friends. To the outside world, he’s ruthless. Even the people who acknowledge his brilliance still say he’s a bastard. I’ve had friends ask me why I’d ever be with him. Family, too. Do you know what I tell them?”
“What?”
“That there’s another Caspian inside the man everyone knows. And he belongs only to me.”
At that moment, I understood why Mateo had Aurora call me. Why he asked Aurora, rather than anyone else, to show me around. I knew that they did want my thoughts on the caverns. They want to know if the spot would make for an unconventional dorm, or if I thought “think tank mastermind sessions in the dark” sounded more new-age-useless or sensory-deprivation-amazing. But I also knew the walk to the caves was mostly an excuse to get Aurora and me alone and talking. Her passion is the development of minds, same as mine, but she also ended up with a soulmate who shouldn’t work for her at all.
“I told myself it’d never work,” I said to Aurora.
“Elizabeth,” she said, putting a hand on my arm, “he moved Heaven and Earth for you.”
It sounded like hyperbole, but as the thought settled and we spoke more, it started to feel almost literal. Obviously, he didn’t move Earth, but he did move aside his plans for the mountain. And although no one can move Heaven, Mateo did the next best thing by bringing my mother’s spirit back to life.
“Do you like it?” Mateo asks me now.
I’m so caught in reverie that it takes me a few seconds to catch up.
The words come quietly. “I love it.”
“Good. Because it’d be a hell of a thing to return. I had no idea how deep I was getting on this until I started talking to Blake. By then, we’d already put up a full story of brick and run the fence and security around the bottom.”
“We talked about it. You and me. That’s why we agreed that even if I had the mountain, there wouldn’t be enough money to make it happen.”
“Not just money,” Mateo said. “Connections. This is no ordinary school. It’s not just a retreat for really smart people to do their think-tank thing and change the world. It’s tied into LiveLyfe and Forage. From what Evan and Rebecca said, half of what we’re building is virtual. I thought you were kidding about the social engineering, but this will take many billions to do right. It reminds me of Batman: he couldn’t just be a vigilante; he had to become a legend first.”
“So are those the connections? Batman? The X-Men?”
“Basically, yes,” Mateo says, not even registering the joke. “Someday, I’ll tell you the whole story. It all started with Nathan Turner. He wanted to get the world’s richest people to chip in so we could control the world.”
“We?”
Mateo nods. “I’m in it. We call ourselves the 'Trillionaire Boys' Club,' but it’s supposed to be a secret. From the start, the idea was to have a core group who were photogenic and popular enough with the press to make the whole thing enviable to old-school billionaires. Nathan figured they would be afraid of missing out if they didn’t join us. Do you see the contradiction?”
“All I see is that you’re stumping for a group that calls itself the ‘Trillionaire Boys’ Club.’ That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Especially since none of you can possibly be real trillionaires.”
Mateo laughs. “Ridiculous name or not, the group needed somewhere to pour its money. They finally settled on something with Anthony Ross, working with a partner named Alexa Mathis who nobody trusted. It looked like that was going to work out, but then Ross disappeared. Us talking about Anthony — that The Pike sounded like something he would have done — gave me the idea to bring this to them.”
“To get them to sponsor The Pike.”
“Invest is a better term. It was Caspian’s idea. He called me a dozen insulting names while explaining how dumb I was to miss this as an obvious solution. He told me I was hurting the entire syndicate by not meeting you halfway and building this place. They had their eyes on us. They’d already considered the plan and green-lit it so long as I got off my ass and made it happen. I suppose I was blind. It took an outside perspective to show me that I wasn’t interested in extreme endurance races. What interested me was pushing the limits of human potential, and your idea does that better than mine ever could.”
I squeeze his arm. “I’m sorry you had to give up your climbing thing.”
He laughs. “Oh, don’t worry. I left some of the choice rock faces outside the fence. I won’t have as epic a challenge as I originally thought, but it’ll still be an enviable place to climb. And it will be right in the shadow of the walled-off, great American mystery, and fuel rumors about what’s being done here.”
“But what about your group of rich people? Will they …?” I let the question hang.
“Nah. As far as evil schemes go, they could be a lot more terrible. It’ll take years to spend the shared trillion dollars, but along the way, they’ll create a ton of jobs. The economy can use that money, whereas the members have been hoarding it. And unlike the Ross plan, which had some serious privacy and Big Brother concerns, this one will at least benefit mankind both before and after the Syndicate ties up all the patents that leave here, of course skimming the best for themselves. This place will be incredibly lucrative. A modern-day Library of Alexandria. But by and large, it’s an open system, with enormous profit on the investors’ end. Strictly speaking, I don’t see many ways that what’s happening at The Pike could be turned to evil.”
“Unless it trains evil mutants, like Megatron.”
“You mean Magneto. Megatron is one of the Transformers.”
“Whatever,” I say.
I lean against him. It feels so good to be beside him again, especially when I’m so tired. Part of me is afraid, same as before. But talking to Aurora calmed me. I know she’s going nowhere. She’ll be helping to run this place — just like I will be if I want to.
“Also, Magneto never attended Professor X’s school,” Mateo says.
“Shut up.”
Enough time passes that my fatigue starts to catch up with me. I could fall asleep right here like we did that first night on the mountain. And I desperately want to. I haven’t felt this content in years. It’s like my past tragedies never happened.
“There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” I tell him.
“What?”
“Why did you wait so long? Why didn’t you just tell me right away that you’d decided to build The Pike, instead of waiting until it was finished?”
“Because I wanted it to be irrevocable. I wanted something that, no matter what you said in response, couldn’t be taken back. You know that story about Cortez, about how he burned his ships so nobody could go home? I talked to the Syndicate, got their buy-in, broke ground, and started having the contractors put up bricks. There are a dozen other things in motion. Rest assured, thanks to some well-placed social buzz; this place will be the planet’s most sought-after institution for education and masterminding. But I wanted it all done before you knew. Money spent. Buildings built, and more on the way. I wanted invites to prospective students and scholars in the figurative mail. Taking it back had to be impossible because otherwise, you might have told me not to do it.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because you’d never want me to do something specifically for you and for nobody else. Which is why I had to do it: to prove to you that in the end, your happiness is all that matters.”
I’m touched. I look up, my head now practically in his lap.
“So you would choose me over the mountain.”
“Ridiculous,” Mateo says. “I got both.”
He leans down. We kiss, softly.
“A trillion-dollar gift,” I say, turning my head toward the horizon. “But what if I didn’t like it?”
From above me, he says, “Oh, there was no risk. I knew you would.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because I could see it in your eyes and your beautiful smile, all those years ago, when I saw you on the beach.”
I turn to look up at him, confused.
“You’ve never seen me on the beach.”
But Mateo just smiles as we watch the sunset together, as our hands meet, as I feel our new and impossible lives together beginning.
“See?” he says. “This mountain is getting more mysterious already.”