The white figure's gaze met Sadako's directly.
The two were of the same origin, face to face—like a person standing before a mirror. One was the restored original; the other was nothing more than the residual consciousness imprinted on the tape at the moment of its creation. A fragment. A shadow of a shadow. They recognized each other the way you recognize yourself.
A curse can't destroy its own source. Not with all the power in the world. The depth of the hatred was irrelevant.
My mistake. I'm leaving.
That was the impression the white figure gave before slinking back into the well. In the same moment, something even stranger occurred—the television snapped back to normal programming. Static, dry well, all of it gone. The black cassette tape slowly ejected itself from the machine.
It was faintly smoking. As if the experience had been somewhat more than it could bear.
What just happened?
Diane stood frozen.
She waited a full minute, completely still.
She checked the mirror on the side wall. Sadako's reflection looked perfectly normal—no distortion, nothing wrong. The phone never rang. Diane couldn't say exactly why, but somehow the curse didn't seem to have touched Sadako at all.
How? Why?
The entire crew falling over themselves for her. Someone with mediocre acting skills, no less—and she'd bumped Diane, an actual American, all the way down to third billing. And now a ghost had looked at her and turned around?
Diane felt her last coherent thought splinter apart.
"Do you have anything left to say to me?"
Sadako's voice was calm and cold.
She knew that tape more intimately than anyone living. She'd quietly produced several hundred copies of it, back in the day.
Diane still hadn't come down from her earlier anger. When the flat, expressionless question landed, she went cold with guilt instantly.
"I— I..."
She looked at the floor and couldn't find words.
"Fine. Don't contact me again."
Sadako stood, picked up her bag, leveled one finger at the tape from across the room—and the residual malice inside it simply came apart. Then she opened the door and walked out, without a second glance.
"No—please—I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!"
The scream that followed was beyond heartbreak. It came from somewhere foundational, the sound of something in Diane collapsing all the way down. Not just love—friendship too. Both at once.
Sadako kept walking.
Diane swept the coffee maker and dishes and magazines off the surfaces. Then she upended the entire dining table.
She didn't know who she was angry at anymore. Sadako? Herself? Everyone?
"Worthless! All of it! Garbage! Worthless trash, all of you—"
She grabbed the cassette, threw it to the floor, and stomped on it. Then she snatched up the shattered pieces and flung them out the window without looking.
Down on the street, a middle-aged man with his arm in a splint and a paper bag of medication in his other hand heard the rush of air and spun sideways, stepped back, and watched the tape clatter past. He looked up toward the window with sharp, measuring eyes—a gaze honed by years of lethal work, the kind that silenced ordinary people on instinct.
Diane had been about to yell something else. That look stopped her cold. She yanked the window shut and retreated to her bedroom, pulling the pillow over her head.
Time passed strangely. Might have been hours. Might have been a moment.
She lay curled on the bed, shivering. Cold all the way through.
Then warmth—sudden and inexplicable.
The bedside lamp clicked on by itself. She turned toward the doorway.
An old man in cowboy clothes stood there, watching her. Expression unreadable.
She didn't know him. But she felt no fear—not even a flicker. No explanation required, no reassurance offered, and yet she knew with absolute certainty: he would not hurt her.
"Are you here to save me? Am I dying? Are you God?"
She reached for him like a drowning person reaching for something solid.
The old man nodded, then shook his head.
No words. No visible emotion—no warmth, no triumph, nothing. But Diane felt courage move into her regardless, and the tears broke through, and the crying that followed seemed to draw something out of her, like poison leaving a wound.
She cried until she had nothing left.
"Can I start over?"
He still said nothing. He pointed toward the coffee table.
A blue key rested there.
He reached into his coat and produced a small blue box. The moment she saw it, Diane felt as though something inside her had been cleansed—the jealousy, the resentment, the hatred, all of it draining away, replaced by a quiet sense of kindness.
She thought she understood.
She wiped her face. "I get it. I'll keep going. I promise."
Down on the street, 006 stood beneath Diane's window cursing for another minute, then gave up and walked away.
His week had been thoroughly catastrophic.
A nuclear warhead. Aimed directly at my skull. Who does that happen to?
He'd been on the yacht, heading out of San Francisco Bay to meet a Weyland client, when the missile descended. The detonator had been disabled in time—but a weapon of that mass still carried enormous kinetic force on impact. He hadn't identified the object at first, and by the time he had, it was nearly upon him. He'd accepted his death. What else could he do? No skill or reflex could outrun that.
Then the detonator cut out. His survival training kicked in immediately—but he wasn't thirty anymore, and the delay had cost him. He'd made it into the water. But the impact had capsized the yacht, and the wheel had caught his arm and snapped it clean.
And now a deranged woman had thrown a cassette tape at him from an upper-floor window.
Is the entire universe coordinating against me this week?
He returned to his lodgings with his head going hazy—dizzy, something clearly off. He completed his daily journal entry and felt increasingly certain that something was wrong. He made an urgent call. Then the darkness took him.
In the borderland between dreaming and waking, he felt himself become a beggar—filthy, gaunt, all four limbs shattered, dragging himself along the pavement on elbows and knees, kept alive by whatever coins people dropped near him.
A blue box appeared beside him, perfectly square. Two tiny figures—no larger than fingers—circled it endlessly, round and round. He felt his memories beginning to dissolve, collapsing at an accelerating rate, faster and faster, until the last of them were gone—and with them, any sense of who he was or what his life had contained.
In the end, he knew only one thing about himself: he was a beggar.