I watch in horror as the fish monster leaves the room in a run, Max dangling in her hand. Coming to my senses, I scramble to my feet and run to my rope, focusing on the hand-over-hand, steady motion. Scrabbling onto the top, I pause for a moment, sending a longing glance in the direction of the door and my brother.Then I enter the vents, not looking back.

Flopping onto my bed, which is really just a soft sponge with a blanket tucked around it, I sob into my cotton-ball pillow. It takes more than an hour to empty my eyes because I keep thinking about poor Max. Who knows what a monster might do to a little borrower boy like him, especially since the fish monster seemed to know what he was... Or something to that accord. What WAS 'anime'?

I had made up that monsters eat borrowers so he wouldn't go near them, or try to make friends with one, but... I was stupid and didn't tell him the truth. We shouldn't have ever gone to the kitchen to borrow, we should have just left. I was stupid, and now he's gone.

Angrily I stand up and whip out my knife, throwing it at the wall. It stabs through the cloth and imbeds itself in the thick insulation, and I angrily tug it out and stab again and again, imagining it to be monster flesh parting underneath my knife. I could help you become so powerful.... It's the voice again. Ever since the monsters were freed, I've been hearing a child's voice echo through my skull at night, twisting and slithering and begging me. I fling down my knife in disgust and huddle in a ball on the floor, imagining all the things those filthy big creatures could be doing to him, doing the things they did to my father.

"Audrey, run!" my dad screams, huge, fleshy fingers closing around his torso. I turn, stumbling blindly into the mouse hole of the previous house, running back to my mother like a coward. I was 12. Max was 7. A year later and we were in the current house, and I was crying as Max recounted how mom was swooped away by an owl. Me, the little thirteen year old borrower, left to care for her brother in a world too big for her.

Panting, I get up, then put on my darkest clothing. Even if it killed me, which it probably would, I would get him freed. I wasn't going to run away and make the same mistake I had made all those years ago. My name was Audrey Gutierrez. And this meant war. I would wait till they went to sleep.