Thirteen

“Thirteen, hm? Aren’t you going to, I don’t know, kill me for that last little incident?” It was a task not to bruise Julianna’s fragile skin pigments although my hold on the peasant woman was anything but rough.

“You’re a fool if you think that they are in a safe haven. The Protectors are weak… they have hardly distanced themselves from us. Their song is still strong within my ears, Julianna.”

“Julia,” She corrected me, her tone dry. Her lips parted and she exhaled a small gasp—- I realized I’d been bruising her. “Well you’re obviously not going after them now. Weren’t you programmed to kill them as the modern day Terminator?”

“Terminator,” I tested the meaningless word. “Yes, I do terminate, perhaps… there was another one to terminate, in the past?”

“Ah, Christ,” Julianna mumbled, frustrated for some reason of the sort. “The Terminator… It’s an old movie.”

“Movie?”

“Yeah.” Confusion welled in my head as I tried to remember the term, if I had ever witnessed the use in the past.

“What?”

“I’m starting to wish that you’d killed me earlier.” Julianna answered in a sigh, bringing a translucent hand to her forehead. “A movie. Moving pictures on a screen… motion picture. Do you know what ‘motion’ and ‘picture’ mean, or are you too dense—-”

“Ah, perhaps you are referring to a film, yes?”

“Sure.”

“The terminator you are subjecting to is a film.” I took a moment to ponder this as we broke from the forestry. “I was not… programmed. It is, in jest, my destiny to find and destroy the Protectors and retrieve the Prophecy to the human kind.”

Julianna barked a guffaw as she prodded from to the edge of the forest. We were now between nature and mankind; the border between the beginning of the forest and town. “And what’s Jack’s role in this?”

I wetted my lips. “I know of the Protectors and who’s to be, not their placements.”

It was only when Julianna lightly brushed a lock of my flaxen hair from my eyes that I realized I had released my grip on her arm. I froze, momentarily stunned by the sudden compassion. Stiff and no longer trekking, I angrily locked my eyes with hers. Julianna drew in air, cross. “I’ve noticed a few things about you, Thirteen. When you talk to me, you don’t move your lips. In fact, I’m not sure if I’ve ever even seen your lips open before, at all. Half of your ear is torn off. Every word you say echos. You’re pale. Your eyes are a weird shade of yellow. The way you walk...” Her words came across as gentle, yet firm. “maybe all of this urban shit is true and Jack has a place. The Protectors have a place. The humans have a place, they’re the ones being protected. But, according to the Prophecy, what’s your place in all of this?”

The back of Julianna’s hand brushed against my jaw line as she drew her arm away from my hair. She did not receive a peculiar answer from me. Once and for all, the human weapon of sound emitted none, for she had no answer.

I was silenced.