Lights Will Guide You Home, a matched fanfic

Lights Will Guide You Home

By Laura Schiller

Based on: Matched/The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe

"Tears stream down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace.
Tears stream down your face
And I ...

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you."

- Coldplay, "Fix You"

"His name was Matthew," Indie says. "He wasn't the first person I loved, but he was the only one who loved me."

The flat, closed tone of her voice is one I know all too well. It's how I speak of Call, on the rare occasions when I can't avoid it, forcing myself to sound strong and matter-of-fact so that no one even thinks of pitying me. She sounds emotionless, but there's a world of pain beneath it.

And it's my fault.

I should have known that asking her to work with me in my old laboratory in the Outpost was a mistake. At the very least, I should have taken down all the schematics of my armor, the drawings I made of how it would look, the spare blades and gears I still had in there, ready to be sharpened until they could grind a man to bloody pulp when he tried to board my ship. I had grown so used to them, I barely even saw them anymore. I should have realized what they would mean to Indie, who lost someone she loved to those same grinding gears.

When she saw them, she turned so pale, her freckles stood out like grains of soot. She ran out of the room without another word.

I chased her, but couldn't catch up. I'm getting used to her sudden disappearances, but every time, I still worry that the next one might be the last. I thought she might try to get past the guards who patrol the Outpost's borders. I don't know what frightened me most, that she might fail or that she might succeed.

By the time she came back, I had cleared away every single scrap of evidence that the armor had ever existed. I could at least do that.

Here she is now, sitting backward in a chair with her arms crossed over the headrest, her red braid unraveling, her eyes swollen. I made tea for us both, but she's not touching it. She's still only half here.

"The first time I met him, he saved my life."

"From your airship crash, you mean?" I prompt her.

"Worse than that. I was sick." She pulls at her shirt collar, as if something was itchy there. "The Society … the country I came from … they had a pandemic. I had such a high fever, I still don't know how I managed to land in one piece." She laughs, an odd blend of bitterness and triumph.

"Shouldn't you have gone to a hospital?"

If they have ships that fly in her country, they must have hospitals. But I can guess before she opens her mouth what she's going to say, and I understand.

"I would've died anyway. I wanted to die moving."

Me too, I almost say, warming my hands on my teacup against the chill of that thought. On the ship, if I could have chosen a way to die, I would have wanted to be in motion too.

"But you survived?"

She nods. "Matthew found me. Picked me up off the forest floor and carried me back to his tent like a baby, hallucinating all the way. He never let me live that down."

She rolls her eyes, but the irritation soon fades. Call used to tease me too, and it never stops being disorienting – that moment when you remember being angry with someone, and then remember that they'll never be there to respond to your anger again.

"It turns out," she clears her throat and sounds suddenly detached, like she's giving me a history lesson, "That the drifters who took me in have a history with the same virus I had. You know what your people call the Desertion?"

All I know is what I've been told all my life: that my city was once part of a nation called the Union, but that nation abandoned us as a waste of resources and left us to fend for ourselves. I know now that's not entirely true, but I've never heard it from the perspective of another country before. "What about it?"

"It wasn't a desertion." Indie's tone darkens. "It was genocide. The Union didn't abandon you. The Society killed them by poisoning their water supply with a genetically engineered virus."

I open my mouth to answer, but nothing comes out.

I can't believe this. I cannot wrap my mind around it. I thought the Admiral was bad, but what he's done is nothing compared to this.

My mother died of a disease too, when I was four years. If I have the strength, I can still remember her coughing blood into a handkerchief, because the factory she worked for didn't filter its smoke. There are enough ways to die here in the Outpost without engineering new ones.

The waste of so many lives doesn't bear thinking about.

"Why?"

"Why do any groups of people kill each other?" She shrugs. "Land and resources, I guess. Didn't do the Society any good, though. The virus came right back to them in the end."

"How do I know this is true?" I challenge her.

Her green eyes glow almost radioactive as she glares at me. "You think I'd make this up, Blythe? Seriously?"

She's right. Someone who's seen as much death as we have would never have the callousness to invent a story like that. I still don't know what this means in terms of my city's history. It will take years for us to understand, if ever we do. All I can do right now is focus on my enemy-turned-ally, and what this means to her.

I bow my head in silent apology, and she accepts it with a roll of her eyes.

"So … the drifters," I prompt her, "Are they the last survivors of what used to be the Union? Did they find a cure?"

"They did." She smiles slightly, and for the first time, her face softens. "It's a flower, if you can believe it. A lily."

"What, like the Gilded Lily? My ship?" I can't help myself. This time, I laugh out loud and so does she.

"That's right. And your stupid nickname for me, too." She reaches across to where I'm sitting, diagonal from her at the table, and punches me on the arm. It's harder than I expected, but I don't flinch.

"You're no flower, Indie Holt."

"Damn right." She takes a gulp of tea and slams the heavy clay mug against the wooden table. "But if I was, I'd be that one. It's bitter as hell, but it saves lives."

"I'd say that describes you pretty well."

But as soon as I say it, the joke falls flat, and I can tell our moment of camaraderie is over. I'm always doing that, misjudging the atmosphere around me. Call was the only one who never let it bother him. He was so easy to read, though. If I couldn't tell how he was feeling, he'd just show me directly.

We sit and drink for a while in a tense silence; even I can tell it's tense, because she frowns into her cup, drums her fingers on the table, and cranes her neck every now and again to look at a drawing on my wall.

It's a drawing of Call. I'm not an artist, but I am reasonably accurate with a pencil. He posed for it by lamplight in my cabin on our first voyage. It shows his face as best I could capture it – his strong bones, deep-set eyes, the way his black hair was always ruffled from standing watch on deck – but I had no colors to match the blue of his eyes or the flush of his cheeks when we made love. Sometimes I'm afraid I might forget his real face, and the black-and-white, two-dimensional drawing will be all I have left. (Sometimes I want to forget.)

"He looks a bit like Matthew," Indie says.

I try not to choke on the irony of that.

"They knew each other, you see, back in the village. They weren't related, but Matthew used to take care of Call like a big brother. When the settlers stole Call along with the other children, Matthew was wild for revenge. And when the news came … "

She doesn't need to continue. I can imagine what happened.

When the news came that the drifters had attacked our first ship and killed the night watchman, only to find out that the night watchman was Call – one of their own people, stolen and made to forget where he came from – Matthew would have been out of his mind with rage. He would have taken the first chance he got to attack the next settler ship that came down the river.

He wouldn't have known, until it was too late, that that ship was outfitted with the first prototype of my armor. The armor I designed to avenge a man I loved as much as Indie loved Matthew.

Her people killed my love. My machines killed hers. There's a cruel symmetry to it. If one of us had killed the other when we first met, it would have made sense.

But that's not the future Matthew or Call would have wanted for us. And so here we are, not to destroy each other, but to build something together; not to accuse, but to listen.

It could so easily have gone the other way. I'm grateful beyond words that it didn't.

I don't apologize. No words will ever be good enough. But I believe she wouldn't be sitting here if she hadn't, on some level, learned to forgive. I know I have.

"Will you go back someday?" I ask her. "To your home?"

"It's not my home."

I give her a skeptical look. Since watching the Admiral fly into the sunset in the Society's golden airship, I take a dim view of people running away from their problems. Indie strikes me as too brave a person to do that.

"It's not. There's nothing left for me back there. There's not a single person I knew whom I didn't either betray in some way, or who betrayed me. I stole an airship, so I'm probably wanted for mutiny. Also … " Her voice quivers. "I don't even know if any of them are still alive."

So it's hope, I realize, that keeps her away.

"He was infected too," she says, so softly I can barely hear her. "Not Matthew. Someone else. My co-pilot, Ky. I was crazy about him, even though he never looked at me. He loved the sky like no one I've ever known. I couldn't stand knowing that he died. He can't have."

"But you don't know for sure."

"No, and I don't want to."

I have never been comfortable with uncertainty. When you work with machines, something either works or it doesn't. When I saw Call's body lying facedown on the deck, I turned him over to be certain it was him, even though it half killed me to do it. I had to know – I always have to know - but I can imagine why Indie might prefer not to.

Still, I can't accept this. I put my mug down on the table, stand up, and put both hands on the wood, exactly like the Admiral used to do when he told the Quorum his final decision.

"If I had the chance – any chance – to find out whether Call was still alive somewhere, I'd take it. Even if he was married to someone else. Even if … " This is hard to say, but I force it out. "Even if he'd forgotten me. I'd still want to see him one last time."

Indie swears at me and shoots me a look of pure acid, but that's how I know I'm right. Moments later, she buries her face in her crossed arms. I know by the way her shoulders shake that she's crying.

I always hated it when the minders at the orphanage used to coo over me and pat me on the back when I cried. I could never tell whether they really felt for me or just wanted me to be quiet. Call used to just sit next to me and wait until I felt like talking. Sometimes I'd be the one to hold on to him.

I follow his example and wait, even though it hurts to watch.

"But they're so far away," is the first coherent thing she says. "The Society doesn't even appear on the maps we have."

"Flying ships, Indie," I retort. "I'd have thought it was obvious."

"Wait." She wipes her eyes and sits up, a dawning light of inspiration on her face. "You mean … "

Was this how I looked when I submitted the designs for my armor to the Quorum? I can't have done. There was nothing hopeful about those.

"You're a pilot." I take a blank piece of drafting paper and a pencil and shove them across the table. "I'm a machinist. The Outpost may not be as advanced as your Society was, but I'll be damned if the two of us can't cobble something together."

She picks up the pencil and grins at me. "I like the way you think, Poe Blythe."

Before long, we're arguing again, but this time it's over technical details, as the sketched outline of the airship begins to take shape on the page. I'm not used to a collaborator, especially one as hot-tempered and opinionated as Indie, but it will be worth it.

Exploration was our first dream, Call's and mine.

Even without him, I can still make it come true.