A tale set against a backdrop of slave rights conflicts in the nineteenth-century Chesapeake Bay region finds young runaway Liz Spocott inadvertently inspiring a slave breakout from the attic prison of a notorious slave thief.

Trying to shape a new life of freedom in Philadelphia after having been a slave, Addy finds inspiration from a new friend.

In two parallel stories, a Quaker family in Kansas in the late 1850s operates a station on the Underground Railroad, while almost 150 years later twelve-year-old Dana moves into the same house and finds the skeleton of a black woman who helped the Quakers.

Traces the search for freedom by a black man and wife who traveled to Boston and eventually to England after their escape from slavery in Georgia.