will be a new beginning…once I find that woman.
“Why did you do it, Will? Why did you steal?” Alastair had asked.
Because I had to. Because I was compelled to .
William had merely shrugged. “It is what my life has become.”
Alastair had nodded, tight-lipped. So many sailors had been forced to leave the Royal Navy’s service in the past decade. The whole country was riddled with down-on-their-luck seamen who didn’t know how to live on land, and therefore turned to crime to survive. William had to let Alastair think that he was one of them.
“How soon will the John Barry return to England after stopping in Sydney?” William asked.
“Two weeks, most likely. I could try to find you, bring you back to the ship somehow…”
Even if William wanted to accept Alastair’s offer, the Spectre would never let him go back to the country of his birth.
He’d tried before to resist performing the tasks the Spectre’s visions and voice told him to perform. He’d defied them time and time again, but the visions had only grown stronger, more insistent. Sometimes they changed to get him to the same endpoint via a different route. The more he ignored them, the more maddening and demanding they became. They never stopped until he did exactly what they wanted.
It would be no different here.
If he were to escape with Alastair, eventually he would find himself right back in New South Wales, shackled to a new vision, a new crime like a noose around his neck. Of that he was certain.
He was meant to be in New South Wales. He could not leave. Not as long as that woman lived.
William had had no choice but to refuse Alastair.
Now, in Sydney Cove, the wind changed course again, angling the John Barry so William could see another hulk bobbing at anchor. Had it been here yesterday or had it only just arrived, in the John Barry ’s wake?
William frowned at the white letters scripted along the hull. “Jem, what’s her name?”
“Ah, that one’s called the Remembrance .”
The other ship’s occupants appeared on the main deck. Colorful skirts whipped about their bodies. Long hair snagged in the breeze. The women gazed toward shore at their new home, shading their eyes with delicate hands against the blazing sun.
Female convicts.
William suddenly couldn’t breathe. He pressed his nose to the glass, desperate to get closer. To see each of their faces. Was she among them? Dear God, he had to know. He squinted and pawed at the glass, but only saw a frustrating, sun-washed flurry of skirts. Then the wind shifted again, turning the John Barry and setting the Remembrance out of sight. His hand on the glass shriveled into a frustrated fist, and his heartbeat thudded loudly in his ears.
To make matters worse, he and the rest of the male convicts sat in their stinking hold another full day, sweating and anxious, before Alastair finally unlocked and kicked open the hatch. A swirl of fresh air coiled its way down through the hold and every man below turned his face up to it as though it were the face of God.
“Gentlemen,” Alastair’s familiar voice called down. “Welcome to New South Wales.”
CHAPTER 2
She was dead.
She must be…it was the only explanation. The air here smelled too sweet. The vast emptiness of this place carved into her soul, leaving nothing in its wake. The whole world had gone far, far too quiet.
She remembered her name was Sera, but nothing else. Nothing about her life before a searing white light had swallowed her up and spit her out onto hard-packed earth beneath a shockingly blue sky.
The light. She remembered the terrifying light.
Passing a shaking hand over her face and hair, she tested whether she were corporeal. Yes, her skin was warm and the part in her long, tangled dark hair burned hot from the sun.
Underneath her prone body the ground was solid and unforgiving as glass, and the sparse blades of rough grass scraped against the small patches of skin on her calves where her pants legs