Jose Arcadio Buendia's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

The clones had scattered into the fields, but Marsh's words stayed with Jose. The buyers would find the facility empty. They would trace the trail to his farm. He had freed the clones, but now they had nowhere to go, and he had no way to fight the men who were coming. Jose stood in his barn at first light. Corn and dragonfruit filled the shelves. Bundled wool sat piled in the corner. He turned in a slow circle. His whole harvest was here. His tools hung on the wall. He gripped the pitchfork and thought. The buyers would come looking for a crime. A dead beast. An empty dorm. Proof that Jose had broken their operation. If they found that proof, they would take his farm and worse. So he decided to give them nothing to find. Jose worked all morning. He buried the beast's body deep behind the barn and turned soil over it. He scrubbed the yard where he had cooked its meat. Then he walked the fields and called the clones back, one by one. They came slow, blinking, still afraid. "You can't wander," he told them. "They'll catch you alone. Here you have a reason to stay." He put the wool in their hands. He showed them the shears and the loom in the barn. He showed them the corn they could plant. Not as clones bought and sold, but as farmhands who worked for their keep and kept what they made. "When the buyers come," Jose said, "you are my workers. Hired. Free. You were never in any dorm." By dusk the barn hummed. The clones carded wool and stacked corn. They looked like any farm crew at the end of a long day. The buyers' truck rolled in after dark. Two men climbed down. They walked the yard with flashlights. They found no beast. No cage. No stolen bodies. Only a farmer, his barn, and a dozen tired workers shearing wool by lantern light. "We heard your facility had trouble," one man said. He watched Jose's face. "I sold my last corn and quit," Jose said. "I run wool now. These are my hands." He nodded at the clones. None of them looked up. The man swept his light across the barn. He saw nothing to seize. No law was broken that he could name. He could not accuse a man of hiring workers on his own land. They left. The truck's lights shrank down the road and vanished. Jose leaned the pitchfork against the barn wall. The clones kept working, hands moving, safe for now. He had hidden them in plain sight. He had turned the leash into a wage. But he knew the buyers would not forget an empty facility. They would rebuild it. They would grow new bodies from new blood. Saving these clones had not stopped the machine. It had only bought him time to find where the next chain began.