The V-tuber Who Became Obsessed With Me

Raina had been searching for hours.

She moved along the container rows with the thermal camera in one hand and her phone torch in the other, stopping whenever the screen showed anything unusual, rescanning, checking the surrounding units. She had started in the section where the cameras last recorded the blue van entering. When that produced nothing she pushed further toward the water, telling herself she had simply missed something, that the answer was one more row over, that she just needed to keep moving.

Her arms ached.

She stopped between two container stacks and lowered the camera and looked at the rows ahead of her.

Steel. Rust. Nothing.

She called Graham.

He answered immediately. "Raina?"

"I can’t find him." Her voice came out unsteady and she did not have the energy to fix it. "I’ve covered the whole section. He’s not here."

"Take a breath."

"I’m trying."

"Then slow down. We’re coming to you. I’ll bring more equipment and contact Jonah to circle back."

"Okay."

"Stay where you are."

She stood in the gap between the containers after the call ended and made herself breathe. In through the nose. Out. Again. The kind of deliberate breathing that did not come naturally but that her body needed whether it wanted it or not.

Then she picked up the thermal camera and kept going.

__

Inside the container, Ethan came back to himself slowly.

His cheek was against the steel wall. The metal was hot through his shirt. When he opened his eyes the darkness inside the container was total and it took him several seconds to understand where he was and then several more to wish he had not remembered.

He breathed.

The air reaching his lungs felt wrong. Thin. Like trying to drink water through a cloth.

He pushed himself upright and his arms shook with the effort and he stopped and waited for the dizziness to pass before he tried again. Sweat covered his face and had soaked through his collar and the back of his shirt, but his hands were cold. He knew what that meant. He had known for a while what that meant and had been trying not to think directly at it.

He got onto his hands and knees and crawled toward the doors.

Each movement took longer than the one before it. By the time he reached them he was breathing in short pulls with a pause between each one, his lungs working harder for less return. He leaned his shoulder against the steel and closed his eyes.

He needed to stay conscious.

He needed to make noise.

He had tried shouting. His throat had stopped cooperating some time ago.

He lifted his hand and let his knuckles scrape across the metal door. The sound it made was nothing. Barely a scratch against steel.

His fingers found the metal bar he had been using earlier.

He tightened his grip on it as much as he could manage.

__

Raina was moving along another row when she stopped.

Something had reached her. A sound from somewhere behind her, faint enough that she was not immediately certain she had heard it.

She turned.

The containers stood still in the afternoon light.

She waited.

Nothing came.

She turned back and continued toward the water. She was almost at the edge of the quay when it came again, clearer this time. A scrape and then a dull impact against metal. Not the settling sounds the containers made in the wind. Something deliberate.

She stopped.

Her eyes moved across the rows. Over the stacks. Past the edge of the dock.

Then she saw the crane.

It was old. The kind of equipment that belonged to an earlier version of this port, left where it stood because decommissioning it had never been anyone’s immediate priority. Rust had worked its way through most of the frame. The paint that remained was blistered and salt-bleached.

And hanging from its lifting spreader, suspended above the water with open sea between its bottom and the surface, was a shipping container.

Another sound came from inside it.

Raina’s stomach dropped.

She moved toward the crane without deciding to.

There was no point saying his name. No point standing at the water’s edge calling into steel. She needed to get it down.

The control panel was mounted on a post beside the crane base, the housing weathered to the point where the cover required force to open. She pulled it and looked at the panel inside.

Switches. Buttons. Labels worn to illegibility on most of them.

She looked up at the container. Back at the panel. Her eyes moved across it until they found one marking that was still clear.

LOWER.

She pressed it.

The crane groaned. Above her, cables drew taut and the container shifted several inches and then tilted.

Raina stepped back.

For a moment it hung at the wrong angle, one corner dipping toward the water, and her heart was somewhere in her throat and her hands had gone to her face without her noticing.

Then it steadied.

She breathed.

The container was still suspended. She needed it on solid ground. She needed it down and she needed it down now.

Her eyes went back to the panel and found a switch under a small protective cover near the bottom. The label above it had mostly worn away. One word still legible.

RELEASE.

She looked at it.

She looked up at the container.

The sound came again from inside. Weaker this time.

She lifted the cover.

Her finger rested on the button for one second. One second where she understood exactly what release meant on a crane holding a container above water and did it anyway because there was no other option available to her and Ethan was inside that container running out of air.

She pressed it.

A heavy mechanical release fired from somewhere in the crane’s upper assembly.

She looked up.

The base of the container shifted. A line of light appeared at the bottom where it should not have been. The floor panel swung open.

Ethan fell.

Raina watched him drop into the water below and the sound that came out of her was not a word.

She threw the thermal camera. She pulled her jacket off her shoulders as she ran and it hit the ground somewhere behind her and she did not look back at it. The edge of the quay came up fast.

She jumped.

The water hit her like something solid. Cold and dark and immediate, pressing in from every side at once. She kicked toward the surface, broke it, looked in every direction.

"Ethan!"

She went under again.