Kyungha enters Inseon's workshop and finds about thirty massive logs leaning against the walls, far taller than the human-sized trees she had originally envisioned for their project. Bloodstains mark the cement floor and workbench where Inseon injured her fingers. Some logs have been daubed black with pine-soot ink, and Kyungha senses they resemble people enduring a nightmare. She forces open the snow-blocked back door and crosses the yard, momentarily startled by a palm tree whose drooping fronds resemble human arms.

Inside the dark house, Kyungha finds Ama dead in the cage, water and food dishes empty. Despite telling herself the budgie wasn't hers to grieve, she weeps as she wraps the small body in an embroidered handkerchief, places it in a biscuit tin padded with her scarf, and wraps the tin in a towel. She fetches a shovel, digs a path through the snow to the palm tree, and laboriously breaks the frozen earth to bury Ama, wondering whether she could have saved the bird had she chosen differently on the path or waited for an earlier bus.

While outside, Kyungha recalls Inseon's last documentary film, in which Inseon interviewed herself against the limewashed workshop wall. In the film, Inseon recounted hiding with her father in island caves during the winter of 1948, when the U.S. military decree marked Hallasan's perimeter for evacuation and execution. Her father swept their footprints away with bamboo, whispered "soksom" (hush), and lamented that Inseon's umung (grandmother?) had not followed them. The film intercut archival photographs of villagers being trucked away and four young men in white being tied to pine trees and shot, plus a long shot of a mass grave trench filled with skeletal remains.

After discovering over a hundred logs total stacked under a tarp outside, Kyungha returns indoors, becomes violently ill, and vomits clear bile, having not eaten all day and lacking her heart medication. The power then fails in the storm. She fills pots with water, breaks a mug, pulls on Inseon's faded sweater and old duffel coat, and lies down on Inseon's mattress shivering with fever.

Feverish dreams overtake her: she imagines reviving Ama under warm water, a glaciated Earth screeching on its axis, birds gliding over ice. She wakes thinking the rattling door is someone come to drag her out, to fit her with a target vest and tie her to a tree, and concludes from the depths of her fever that she has come to this house to die.