Beneath the Continental Hotel's main structure—operating under its umbrella—the Brotherhood had established what they called a "City Sanitation Company."
The name said it all.
What they cleaned, however, wasn't gardens or recyclables or ordinary household trash. The City Sanitation Company handled bodies. Once a contractor completed a job, the company dispatched a team to sanitize the scene.
Less than half an hour after Bella made her call, a cleaning van pulled up outside Sadako's rental apartment.
The crew's backgrounds were all roughly similar—former inmates who had served their time with good behavior, received reduced sentences, and had no intention of going back to a life of crime. They were men who struggled to find legitimate work on the outside. They were men who had long since made their peace with the sight of death.
Some carried old injuries. A few were disabled.
The Continental gave them somewhere to land.
They arrived without ceremony. The smell that had nearly knocked Bella flat didn't seem to reach them at all. They wrapped Diane's heavily decomposed body in plastic sheeting and removed it. They scraped the bloodstains off the walls, rolled on fresh paint, wiped the windows clean, and worked a can of air freshener through every corner of the room.
In under ten minutes, the apartment looked like nothing had ever happened.
Bella produced a gold coin—the Continental's custom denomination—and handed it to the crew chief. He removed his hat, gave a short nod, and left without a word.
Bob Harris watched from a distance, quietly unsettled. She had made one call, and this whole operation had materialized. He was standing in the middle of something that had no regard whatsoever for the law. Was he in over his head?
Too late to ask that now. He was already in too deep.
The unease passed, and something more calculating took its place. If he had Bella's network behind him—even at the edges of it—what else might he be able to leverage? Honest men had families to feed too. Honest men needed to make a living.
He kept those thoughts to himself. Bella was listening to Sadako recount the strange two days she had just lived through.
It had started simply enough—Diane taking Sadako to watch a videotape together, the friendship curdling from there—and then everything had turned dreamlike. Diane's mindset could be summed up in one phrase: envy, jealousy, and spite.
And what had the angel Castiel been doing in all of this?
He had granted Diane's wish. He had forcibly rewritten Sadako's fate. But why? What had he seen in Diane that made her worth intervening for? Would this woman, now a decomposing corpse, have become someone important? Bella genuinely could not follow the angel's logic.
Sadako's involvement, at least, could be explained as a messy tangle of love and resentment. But what did any of this have to do with 006?
The thought of 006 made her turn to Sadako directly: "One more thing—a friend of mine somehow got caught up in all of this. Can you take a look at him?"
"Of course. Where is he?"
Three days later, 006 woke slowly in a Los Angeles hospital bed.
The procedure had been something like what Bella had done with the Iron Finger technique—his already-twisted limbs had been re-broken and set, and then Sadako's ability had stood in for the Rejuvenating Balm, knitting the bones back together, one limb at a time. After the limbs came the throat. Every injury, external and internal, was worked through in sequence.
The wounds healed. But the mental and physical battering of those few days wasn't something that cleared up so easily. His body had been gutted of its reserves. He would need to rest.
While he slept, Bella had caught glimpses of his memories. 006's entire connection to Diane amounted to a single moment: a look through a window—cold, sharp, and involuntary.
006 had materialized at the worst possible time, in the worst possible place, on the day Diane hit rock bottom.
He'd been walking down the street when a broken VHS tape struck him out of nowhere, and he'd glared at the source of it. It was only a split-second of irritation from a man who'd been having a bad enough week already. He hadn't done anything. He'd gone home. He'd written in his diary that evening, same as always.
In the real world, no one plots revenge because a stranger shot them a dirty look—let alone goes out that night to slaughter the man's entire family. The very idea was absurd.
And yet it had happened. Diane was the embodiment of nursing a grudge until it poisoned everything. You look at me like that? Then you'll pay for it.
Her anger needed somewhere to go. Her grief needed a target. She couldn't bring herself to turn it on Sadako. So 006 became the most convenient outlet she had.
In the falsified world she'd helped conjure, he had been reduced to a limbless, voiceless beggar.
"You're awake." Bella was turning a small blue box over in her hands—square, roughly the size of a fist—when she noticed 006's eyes open. She spoke quietly.
Destroyed. That was 006's first coherent impression upon waking. It felt like he'd been shot seven or eight times, drugged senseless, thrown into the ocean in a sack, and bitten by a shark for good measure. Everything in front of him was doubled.
"What's that in your hand?" he asked, voice thin.
He recognized the box. It had been with him from the first day he'd woken up as a beggar—sitting nearby, stubbornly present, completely inaccessible: no arms, and no key. He'd never found out what was inside.
He let out something between a laugh and a grimace. "Another inexplicable supernatural object, I assume. My first forty years were... perfectly normal. Since I met you, things have been escalating. And now here we are." He paused. "I was directly involved in whatever this was. I think I'm owed at least some kind of explanation."
Bella considered it for a moment, then told him straight: "That thing holds the evil of ordinary people."
"Evil?" He didn't follow.
"I don't know what whoever made it would call it. But from what I can observe, that box was absorbing the darkness inside everyone caught up in this incident."
006 still looked lost. Bella elaborated.
"All of us—you, the doctors and nurses outside, including me—carry some measure of darkness inside. More or less, but it's always there."
She weighed the blue box in her palm. "That thing drew the darkness out of everyone in the vicinity and used Diane as its center point. It constructed an environment that was kind and harmonious, where everyone's impulses were running on their best setting."
"In that environment, Diane was warm and generous. The film director—" She paused. "You don't know him. Let's just say his wife had been cheating on him; when he found out, instead of killing anyone, he hit someone and left it at that. As for your own experience—you know it better than I do. You had it worst by far, but people around you still tossed you food now and then. No one let you starve."
"Step back and look at the whole picture," Bella continued. "Wasn't that actually a more... constructive environment than the one we normally live in? It wasn't paradise. But people's behavior did operate on a much higher moral baseline. A kind of..." She searched for the word. "A kind of illusion, I suppose—artificial in every detail, but internally coherent."
She gave a small, simple account of the full thing, laying it out without embellishment.