The Underground Railroad: A Novel Novels & Stories

When I entered the room with the girls behind,, everyone stood and greeted me. ----------------------------------------- NEET Good evening to all of you, have a seat. ----------------------------------------- Once everyone was seated Ella came with a map in one hand and her laptop in other. I waited for her to speak. ----------------------------------------- ELLA *placing the map open on the table* We found one of their important warehouse and it's not that far from ur school. NEET *my face darkened hearing that* What does it deals with? ELLA All the captured teens and children are kept there. It's there one of the three main trafficking base.

Surrounded by nothing and no one, it was the perfect place to keep someone who didn't want to be there. An ambush could be seen coming for miles. The prisoner had nowhere to run and hide. Plus they had an underground cellar filled with food and water, in case they were caged in like animals. It was an ingenious build. But now it was the bane of my existence. "Please go and fetch Rafael for me. We have a lot to figure out." I asked the new man. He nodded. Scampered off of the ground before I could ask him again.

Justin spoke more to himself looking anxious. “And what do you believe?” His gaze shot to me as he hesitated, “I know it doesn't lead to hell that’s for sure.” “How?” Eddy interrupted, “Eric sent him down to see how the slaves were cooperating.” Justin hissed visibly paling, “It is.. a long way down. The slaves are kept in cells carved in rock. They go mad from lack of light and food some even try to climb out and fall breaking bones. It was a mercy to end them..”

She wrote until there wasn't a fairy tale lie she couldn't expose anymore. "The End," she wrote at the last page of her novel. Cathedra climbed atop her desk chair and hung a noose over the beams. She tied a knot firmly, making sure it was strong enough to fulfill its purpose. She slipped the knot over her head. She jumped and kicked the chair off. For a few minutes she struggled and fought for breath, the way humans were normally programmed to do. For a few minutes, she had enough time to reflect on her short-lived life.

As she walked, she could feel the book's weight on her back, and it seemed to be getting heavier with each step. Finally, she reached the spot and dug a hole in the ground with her bare hands. She placed the book inside and covered it up with dirt, making sure to pack it down tightly so that no one could see the outline of the book. With a heavy heart, Noelle turned around and walked away, hoping that she had done the right thing by hiding the book. At the lower town smoke billowed up from buildings that were on fire, and the sound of explosions could be heard in the distance. Soldiers were rushing around, trying to contain the situation, but they seemed to be outnumbered and overwhelmed.

Even as I withered, I still bore traces of him. "Ives, don't do this." Rhianne was visibly flustered. Born a pauper, she had never in a million years imagined someone like him entering her life. But fate had been kind to her. Ivor was drawn to her, and Jeffrey pitied her. Her rightful identity as the Shaw family's true daughter propelled her from the bottom to the top. In the process, I was stripped of everything I had. There was no doubt that she was lucky but also deeply unfortunate.

******DRAKE'S POV******** It had only been twenty-four hours since Ash delivered the news that my uncle was dead. Cold. Ruthless. No emotion on her face, just the words—He's gone, she didn't even feel guilty for killing him. And now, here I was, tied to a splintered wooden chair in the middle of a stinking warehouse, surrounded by men who would kill me if they realized I was awake, let alone planning my escape. The air was thick with the sour stench of sweat, booze, and rusting metal. The place reeked of old blood and rot. Dim yellow lights flickered overhead, casting shadows that danced with every creak of the walls.

Still, it was a roof, and none of them complained. Celeste had fallen asleep curled against Silas’s chest, the deep kind of sleep that only came from being physically and emotionally spent. Calix had made sure Victoria had extra blankets before settling in himself, this time without her sneaking across the hall. They left before sunrise. The sky was still dim when they reached the end of the road, literally. The last stretch of plowed road ended at the mouth of an old steel tunnel carved into a hillside, flanked by thick evergreens and buried beneath at least two feet of snow. The underground bunker, hidden from satellites and maps alike.

Living felt worse than dying, and she sank into complete despair. Just when she thought she would die there, someone suddenly bailed her out. She thought her name had finally been cleared. Hope flickered back to life, only for that person to knock her unconscious. When Serena woke again, she realized she had been taken to an underground slave farm. This was the darkest corner of the entire pack. Inside were Rogues exiled for crimes, slaves abandoned by their masters, and captives from rival packs. They were forced to fight each other for scraps of food.

I close the third notebook. I stand up from the kitchen table and I stretch my back and I look at the Halverson Building's kitchen around me, which is the kitchen of a crumbling building in an illegal city where the boiler breaks twice a month, and I think about Dasha saying I did not have the tools and you had the tools and the community built the tools together and I think about how the tools were built: by people sitting at a table twice a week and telling the truth about what happened to them.