It begins, almost always, in the dark — in a sliver of silence between the creak of floorboards on a colony that’s been asleep for hours. A young man, sometimes a woman, sometimes a family, steps out of their room, leaving a handwritten note on the bed. They leave everything and everyone they’ve ever known behind, often with just the clothes on their back.

Then a stranger pulls up in a minivan.

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The driver is almost always a volunteer, someone from a modest network spread thin across the Canadian Prairies — rural Alberta, southern Manitoba, parts of Saskatchewan. They have a name, a location, and a protocol. The name came through Dan Roy, the man who organizes this entire underground operation.

When the door opens and the Hutterite climbs into the vehicle, the first t

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