He’s just trying to disarm us.
“Mr. Ortega?” Owen asks, his voice softening.
“You know this guy?”
“I wouldn’t say I know him.”
“Who is he?”
“Long story,” Owen answers.
He sighs softly as the man continues weeping.
“I’ll fill you in on the walk back to his house.”
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Falcon
The walk back through the woods toward Warren Corvina’s house feels a lot longer than it did when I was alone, following tracks this guy made sometime earlier. Owen explains his story as we go, and Mr. Ortega cries quietly for the entire journey, letting us lead him back home without asking any questions.
He doesn’t seem capable of coherent conversation.
He just keeps whispering one word, “Zelena.”
“Isn’t that the name of that popstar?” I ask, when I realize where I’ve heard it before.
“Yeah,” Owen confirms. “That’s his daughter. Kind of.”
“Kind of?”
“Warren Corvina replaced her when she … "had an accident" as a kid,” Owen says, doing air-quotes one handed. “Ortega’s wife went to prison over covering everything up. It seemed weird that this guy avoided that fate at the time, but now I get it.Clearly, Warren did something to keep this guy out of jail so he could break into the academy later.”
I take it in silently, not wanting to make Ortega any more upset.
His daughter died, and Warren Corvina replaced her with another kid.
That’s so diabolically fucked up.
“It gets kind of wild after that,” Owen goes on.
“Itgetswild?” I can’t help but laugh.
Owen nods. “You’ve probably heard about the brainwashing experiments Corvina conducted on Omegas. Well, that’s the tip of a very big iceberg.”
“I know he also trained a lot of psychologists and therapists, and there are rumors that he might have shared some of his techniques with a whole lot of them.”
“He ran clinics that he probably used in his experiments, too.”
“Experiments?” Ortega whispers.
“You remember experiments?” Owen asks.
The guy doesn’t respond.
He sniffles, sobs, and goes quiet again.
“Is that why he’s like this?” I ask Owen.
