"Round and round it goes, Where it stops, nobody knows."

The boy spun the barrel of the revolver, the single bullet spinning round and round. The girl on the other side of the table stared at the wall behind him, waiting for him to finish stalling. He'd been spinning it for about five minutes already, never once even close to bringing the weapon to his head.

Strangely, though any other gang member would have sported an extremely exasperated and infuriated expression, and would have snapped at him long ago, she didn't do anything. She just stared at the wall, empty faced, waiting. Sighing, the boy raised the gun to his head, and rested his index finger on the trigger.

The girl didn't move, didn't even blink an eye. He quirked an eyebrow up at her lack of reaction, surely she would be glad that he had actually done something other than spin the bullet round!

the voice came back, definitely female. He'd heard it ever since he'd walked down the stairs, where she'd been waiting for him, the revolver sitting on the table between them. He'd had to go first, both because it was his gang that had broken the rules and because he came in late and last.

He clenched his teeth and frowned in concentration.

Click.

He held the gun out and shook his head to try and physically shake the foreign voice from his mind. The girl - she had long, black shiny hair - stretched her arms as if her muscles had frozen whilst she had waited, and in the same movement grasped the gun from his outstretched hand.

She spun the revolver in a well-practiced motion - did she do this all the time? - and swiftly, too swiftly to be natural, the boy thought, brought the gun to her head and-

Click.

The boy picked up the gun from the table where she had silently placed it. She was quiet, quiet in movement, too quiet in his opinion. Running his slightly shaking and sweaty hands through his lank blonde hair, he noted that she had pierced ears - two in one ear and one in the right - but the extra earring in her left ear was not the same as the other two. The identical set were platinum-like studs, with a diamond set in them; the extra earring was a hoop with a sapphire drop hanging from it. Strange how he could notice such a small detail, and at this time.

"Another bullet then. Two bullets, four empty slots." He cracked open the stock and slid in another bullet from the four that were still on the table. She didn't nod, didn't say anything in affirmation or agreement. He winced, the voice was piercing, cold.

Spinning the barrel around, he watched it as it finally slowed. Bringing it to his head, he pressed the trigger, gently, as if it were a sore wound.

Click.

He could almost see the rest of the two gangs sitting in the room above, growling and making menacing faces at each other like gangs usually did in times like this. How did I end up in a gang? The boy remembered how two years ago, he'd been bullied a bunch of drop-kicks - ones who were too dumb to ever be taken in by gangs - and had been saved by The Gang of the neighbourhood. They'd offered him protection and would train him on how to protect himself, and in return he would defend the gang if attacked, he would hang with them when he could, he would go with the pack.

Foolishly, perhaps, he'd agreed. The small tattoo of a turtle's shell graced the inside of his lower arm. When he went up a rank, a head would be added, then a leg, and eventually the tail. If he was ever to become the leader - that is, if the original leader died and he was chosen to be leader - the entire turtle would be done over in purple. There was more to the rank tattoos than just what rank you were. The shell meant you protected the gang, the head meant you watched out, the legs meant you did the footwork, the tail meant you steered it.

Normally, it was always the first rank of the gang - the shells, in his case - who had to do Roulette duty. He couldn't see her tattoo because of the black riding trench-coat she wore, and he examined her extra earring closely. Some gangs also used the earring to identify themselves, and hers was one that he had seen, once, and had been taught which gang it signified. He gasped, aloud, but the girl acted as if she hadn't heard him.

That explains why there weren't many in her gang upstairs, he mused. They were extremely select, which only fuelled his beliefs that they weren't human. There were rumours of the girl with black hair having a robotic arm, but he couldn't see it, since she was wearing a black leather trench-coat and gloves. They were rich, almost obscenely wealthy. He'd seen her motorcycle and he'd counted twenty-four other motorcycles. There were twenty-four other members of her gang present, and the fact that some of them looked similar really freaked him. The word 'clone' kept popping up in his mind.

Click.

The boy added another bullet to the revolver, and his hands began to really sweat. "1 to 1 chances, hey?" Three bullets, three empty slots. She didn't answer or acknowledge his poorly jab at a conversation.

No-one sent their leader downstairs. Or at least it was unheard of. The boy's gang was the first in a long time to step onto the girl's gang's turf. Those that had had disappeared long ago, the gangs practically vaporising like dew on the grass. Temporary, gone, forever, replaced by others.

Click.

He placed the revolver down, gently - or at least as gently as he could. It made a metallic sound, and he flinched slightly, the alien noise unheard until then, unnatural to his ears.

She swept the gun - silently, and the boy wondered how she had learned to move so quickly, so quietly - from the table, spun the barrel, pulled the trigger and.

The pin clicked on an empty chamber.

Swallowing, the boy grasped the gun and slid in another bullet. There were other rumours, that she had pulled the trigger and a bullet had shot out - but it hadn't killed her. Others from the losing band - in that encounter - had told of how she had walked out from the basement, blood dribbling down the side of her head. They'd told of how the blood, once it reached her skin, her face, it gradually faded away, leaving the skin beneath a little pinker, but that too faded. 'Don't believe them,' the boy's gang's leader had told them, looking a little uncertain himself. 'They were probably off their faces, trying to forget.'

A four out of six chance that with this shot, he would blow his brains out. Or a two out of three chance, said the minutely small part of his brain that decided it would spout some mathematical expertise. He'd never been awake enough to absorb much of his classes, being too exhausted from the events of the night before, with the gang.

He'd learnt enough about school to pass - that sitting next to Jenny or Mark during a test would improve his marks, that discreetly 'borrowing' that piece of paper could help him do his assignment, and so on and so forth.

With his skill at 'borrowing', his local gang - the Shells - had readily accepted him into their fold and had placed him in the 'thieves' group. Yet, though he was sufficiently skilled at the art of theft and occasionally asked to misappropriate certain rather high-grade and high- risk items, here he was, risking his life for the gang.

Spinning the barrel idly, he heard the voice, again. The boy stiffened. He'd heard those stories as well. From the apparently intoxicated gang members - the girl's gang was known for its silence of gang matters and also on their peculiar unwillingness to speak at all - they had gone down to find their friend, and four bullets in the revolver, none on the table. There were two bullets on the floor, one on the right of the empty chair, and one on the left of the dead girl's body. Both were spattered in blood, though the one on the other side of the table had only a few drops, while the one next to the dead girl was covered in the substance.

All the gangs had agreed that a finished tattoo would signify the vice- president or equivalent rank, and if it was done over in indigo, the leader. The better-off bands would also provide 'uniforms', which were more or less the normal street clothes but all identical, done in the colours of the gang. The richest would adorn these 'uniforms' with a small broach, or perhaps an insignia; when a member rose or fell in the ranks they would change to the corresponding items. If they died or left the gang - which usually guaranteed that they would die anyway - their uniform would not be passed on to be used again, instead, it would be burned.

His gang had sent him down here to die, whether inside of the gang laws or to be killed by the strange girl, by her own personal weapon. She was pretty, and would have been classified 'totally f***able' by almost all of the male friends he knew, and a few of his female friends as well. Though only if they didn't know who and what she was. Girls like that had no place in gangs, he thought, surely she didn't want to risk her looks?

Judging by the fact that she was the most beautiful in her gang and probably the sexiest though he had never been able to make out her form underneath her baggy gang-clothes - and didn't want to either, for fear of being caught - and also that this was not her first time on roulette duty, he supposed not. And it wasn't like she would die either, which kind of made the fact that 'she had everything to lose' obsolete.

She was the leader of the Lightnings for goodness' sake! They had many other names, like the Super Soldiers, the FlitGold, and all those other names her gang had gained over the years, all of them complementary. Or at least if a negative name had been suggested, no-one dared to use it.

He raised the gun to his head, and knew that no matter what he tried, he would either be killed by his own hand, by the hands of his fellow gang members, or by her.

He jumped, literally, but the girl didn't move at all, didn't take the open chance to direct a cutting remark at him.

Better by my own hand, he thought. He pulled the trigger, and.

Nothing happened. No click. No jolting explosion. He cracked the gun open, and saw to his horror that the chamber the pin was supposed to hit was loaded. For a second, he thought he glimpsed a shadow wrapped around the bullet, but it faded away.

He looked up, meaning to say something about the revolver not working, but the words died on his lips. This development, alone amongst all the other things that he had said and done, brought an immediate and abrupt response from the girl. She was standing, behind the chair - how she'd gotten up and moved there so quickly was beyond him - her body settling into a comfortable guard position, her eyes darting around the room.

"Er. what's the matter?" he asked, timidly. She didn't answer, choosing again, as she had the entire evening, to ignore him. A different voice, similar, almost identical, but less harsh sounded in his head. How this new voice knew his name, and the way she'd - the voice was again, female - said the last word silenced whatever questions he had, whatever pleas for mercy he'd wanted to say.

The girl stiffened, and scowled in anger. Perhaps the voice was talking to her. Something shimmered beside the table, and the boy scrambled from his chair, backwards, knocking the chair down, towards the stairs leading up to ground level. The shimmer took on a distinct human shape, and the boy, recalling how the voice was almost exactly identical to the girl's, noted that the shape was the same height, the same build, in fact, everything was exactly identical to the girl.

Clone? Probably, or maybe an identical twin.

The shimmer coloured, became a human, exactly like the girl, except this new arrival did not wear the trench-coat, and did not have a glove on her left hand. The metallic glint of the new arrival's left arm told him at least one rumour was true.

Both stared at each other, communicating in some way. The boy, not wishing to see what happened next, crawled towards the stairs, but upon reaching the point where the basement turned into the stairwell, he collided into something solid, though invisible. Magic, the boy thought, mortified.

He could still see them. The arrival shifted into the same guard position the girl had been in for the entire silent exchange. The arrival activated the energy blade in her left arm, and the first girl removed her trench- coat. Martin saw that the first girl didn't have a cyber-technic arm, perhaps the stories had been about the other girl. Thrust into the girl's belt, hidden beneath the baggy trench-coat, was an array of weapons, ranging from simple daggers to grenades to a medium-sized shotgun and a length of metal, though Martin did not know what that was for. How she could ride with daggers belted to her thighs and arms on top of that was beyond him.

The newcomer, the cyborg, did not carry any weapon other than her arm.

Realising he still held the revolver, he placed it slowly onto the ground beside him. The girl took off the weapons belt, revealing beneath the real belt. She chose the length of metal and pressed something, and a length of light shot out of one end, identical to the cyborg's energy blade apart from the colour - hers was lava orange and the cyborg's was indigo.

From here, he could see that he had been right in guessing the extra adornment on her ring meant she was leader: he could see the hint of indigo on her inner right arm, though it was nowhere near as vibrant as the cyborg's energy blade.

The pair leapt at each other, and Martin could see that the girl had a slight advantage in that she had a little extra reach, though the cyborg more than made up for it with a definite superiority in skill at wielding the weapon. Martin could see that the cyborg was faster, though the girl seemed to be stronger. Perhaps the cyborg trained with the blade more than the girl did, and the girl had built up her strength to the point it marred her speed a little.

Suddenly, he fell backwards, and his back connected with the stairs behind him. Whoever had used the magic had let go of it, perhaps to conserve energy. Grasping the gun, he began to crawl up the stairs but stopped. If he reached the room above, her gang would rush down and interfere. He didn't want the girl to win, though he didn't know why.

Crawling back down the stairs, he was in prime position to witness the destruction of the clone, code KA01. He saw the victor deactivated the blade, though somehow, Martin knew that it was not that which had rendered the loser to a small pile of ash. She picked up the weapons belt and strapped it on, then shrugged on the trench-coat.

He shifted out of the way as the victor strode towards him and paused as she passed him. He shrunk back, not wanting to die. She strode onwards and upwards, towards the main level. The sounds of several motorbikes roaring away could be heard, and Martin's gang clattered down the stairs.

They gasped when they saw he was hale and healthy, and he pointed to the pile of ash. "That was the girl. The girl who went up the stairs was the Original, and the girl was a clone."

As he explained what had occurred, he stopped suddenly when a loud blast, followed by several more, rocked the basement. Dust and small pieces of ceiling fell down, and the Shells raced out - no sense in being crushed. As the gang raced up the stairs, the revolver that Martin had left by the exit was kicked hither and thither, and Martin tried to pick it up, only to have it kicked out of reach yet again.

He paused for the gang to squeeze up the stairs, and he bent to pick up the gun, just as the ceiling creaked ominously. Grabbing it, he pounded up the stairs, then around across the centre of the room to the ground level's exit. The building had been made so that the stairs were opposite the exit of the ground level, and as Martin reached the centre of the room, which was the weakest point in the basement's roof, the floor beneath him crumbled, and he leapt for the door.

Why was the building so damaged?, he thought. Surely the blasts were too far away to affect it. The logical part of his brain explained it away, saying that the district where roulette duty was performed was an old and abandoned part of town, all the buildings were creaky and derelict, sometimes crumbling into dust when the force of gravity was too much for the rotten supports.

As he shot out of the building, the roof collapsed behind him, then the walls, dust whirling around him, making him cough.

"Good God, kid. What the hell where you thinking?! We can replace that gun but it would've taken us AGES us to find a replacement for you!"

Martin shrugged. He just felt that the revolver should be kept. He was only 7, and what he had witnessed didn't really shock him much, come to think of it. And whatever dreams he would have would not haunt him as he grew older, they would only appear infrequently, twisted entirely into dream elements which bore no resemblance to their real-life counterparts.

Not so far away, the Lightning gang, comprised entirely of clones, were ash, dust, destroyed in the roaring inferno which was their bikes and a few well-placed grenades and plasma shots.

A shimmer disappeared, and the people who saw what happened thought it was a heat shimmer, that the figure that had thrown the grenades and fired the weird shots had been destroyed by the fire.

The cyborg travelled another next capital city, where another gang of clones resided. The stories that Martin had heard had been from other cities, where the cyborg had cleansed it of its clones.