story beginning?

Here is my writing exercise from yesterday.

I’m ready to get violent with whoever is tapping on the table—but just before I sigh in exasperation I look down.

I am the culprit.

My fingers are dancing, dancing like madmen. They remind me of feet, the feet of hanged men on a tree. I saw that once, before I came here. Two hanged men, side by side. Four legs, four fingers, dancing madly.

I squeeze my fingers back toward my palm, making a tight fist. I feel the eyes of others on me. I disturbed them, too.

“Vera,” comes the computerized voice through the speaker above our heads. There is a collective sigh breathed from every mouth in the room.

Well, almost every mouth.

Vera is the girl next to me. She is stone. I scan her face, and she catches my eye; she is afraid. I look away. I hadn’t meant for that connection to take place. I would have trouble sleeping tonight, remembering that moment.

The door opens, and a rush of air sends my hair flying. I wait, frozen, as two men enter the room. They smell of sweat and leather, and their arms and faces glisten in the light of the one light bulb swinging above us. There is one man for Vera’s left arm, and one man for her right. She doesn’t struggle. She merely stands, and allows them to escort her out. The thick metal doors slam behind them, and the rest of us pray prayers of gratitude.

And I wonder: did she know?

When she stepped into the room, did she know that she would be the one escorted out?

I shiver. None of us know what happens when you leave this place. When you leave Home. That’s not what this place is; it’s just a title. I can barely remember my real home, but the snatches of memory I have are enough to remind me that this place, whatever it is, is anything but home.

There were twelve of us, once. Twelve of us.

Seven are left.

In my mind, I call it the Selection: the time when we all come to this room, and wait for our name to be called. Wait to be Selected.

I don’t know what the process is for. I wonder if it’s death. I remember Vera’s eyes and shudder. She was wondering the same thing, if the calling of her name meant her destiny was death. But what had she done? We were obedient.

We were obedient.

“You may exit,” the voice through the speaker comes again. We all stand up to leave. All of us, except Vera.

And four others. The four others who were called before.

“Maybe it’s freedom,” Laurie says as we move toward the door. Everyone turns to look at her.

“It doesn’t have to be bad,” she says as Millie opens the door so we can go. There is another rush of air, and I hear a scream from somewhere else in the building. It soaks through the walls like water, flooding the room. We drown in it.

I usually am 100% opposed to the use of the present tense in narration, but I was writer's-blocked and just started writing. I really like this beginning. But I have no idea where it's going.

I thought of having the narrator be:

- a priestess in training
- a gladiator
- a human sacrifice of some sort

And then last night I got the idea that maybe she could be a slave--like a slave in training. Something like that. When she is Selected, it will be her time to be sold at an auction, and the price will be high because she is trained in combat but looks weak. Her current owner maybe made a fortune off of kidnapping girls, training them up to be hardcore potential assassins, and then selling them at exorbitant prices to the elite who could really use a nice-looking girl to sneak into certain places and wreak havoc. Something like that.

I mostly like that idea, but I don't like how animal my main character is becoming. I hate in fiction how female characters so often are just tomboys. I think it's cheap and denigrating to femininity in general. There are already way more stories about boys than about girls, and even in books about girls, male characters typically outnumber the female characters by a wide margin. Why is it that even in stories with strong female characters, those characters almost always spend all their time trying to be men?

[/rant]

Anyway. Any ideas? Anyone?