4128.59 · February 28, 1808 AD
Don't Waste It Looking Back
Ten months. Fifteen thousand miles. Thirteen men dead in the hold. And now, at dawn, a cry from the masthead that changes everything: Land ho. William Jeffries grips the salt-crusted rail and watches Australia emerge from the mist—sandstone cliffs glowing amber, white birds screaming overhead, a harbour that opens like a mouth. Beside him stands Old Tom, the man who kept him alive through the voyage. By nightfall, Tom will be gone. Some lessons cost everything.
The gangplank burns beneath bare feet.
After three hundred days at sea, William Jeffries descends onto Australian soil and finds a world designed to overwhelm. The sun hammers down with a fury England never knew. The air tastes of eucalyptus and smoke, of salt and something green and utterly foreign. Cockatoos shriek from the treetops like hinges on a gate to hell. And everywhere—the heat, the light, the brutal clarity of a land that cares nothing for the men it swallows.
The processing is swift. Name, crime, sentence. A captain's quill scratches across a ledger, and futures are decided in moments. Some men are sent to the quarries at Castle Hill, where labour grinds bodies to dust. Others receive gentler fates—or what passes for gentle in a penal colony at the edge of the known world.
Old Tom, who shared his wisdom through ten months of darkness, is led away toward Castle Hill. His parting words are few: Don't waste it looking back.
That night, in a holding barracks that refuses to sway beneath him, William lies awake and lets the memories come. Portsmouth. His parents. The copper-haired thief who stole his life.
Seven years stretch before him. The question is what he'll become.
