Disclaimer: Kiera Cass owns all plot points and premise that pertain to The Selection, and I am just playing around with what she made.

Seven

By Lleymar

Chapter 1

We'd been waiting for the letter for seventeen years. It only took a short calculation and a cross of fingers when I was born; for once a family was happy to have a girl.

I had been praying for Prince Gabriel's Selection my whole life, but looking the official paper in the face made my stomach roll. Or maybe I was just hungry. My life as a Seven was anything but comfortable, but complaining didn't buy clothes or put food on the table.

I knew that it was pointless to enter in a competition with thousands of other girls, each in turn hoping to win. But someone had to be picked, and I wasn't one to pass up an opportunity for it to be me.

"Here," my mother said, passing me a pencil. Her once blond hair was streaked with gray and her face was prematurely lined. She looked over my shoulder as I wrote, but she had a vague disinterest about her that made me wonder if she'd even put her name in the selection and failed to get in.

When had a Seven ever been one of the 35 girls to go to the palace? The lowest caste I'd ever heard of was a Six in King Stephen's selection. She got eliminated on the first day, but at least she left a Three. I tried not to think about the prospect of winning, but my imagination took hold once in awhile and I couldn't control myself.

My mother could end her factory work and finally let her ruined hands rest. She could pursue a different career, maybe learn how to dance like she told me was her passion. My twelve year old sister, Sophie, could sing all she wanted and go to school instead of weed the gardens of Twos. My two brothers had been taken by the military draft, but I could pay their way out.

I could finally be rid of my father. We barely had enough money to feed ourselves, but the small sum we ever had went to his drinking. He'd come home in terrifying moods, smashing chairs against the walls and people too if we got in the way. Our apartment was one room, so we couldn't run or hide, we just had to shut our eyes and hold onto each other, taking each blow without a tear. He wasn't always like this. He and my mother were once very much in love, enough for my mother to drop a caste from a Six. As reality hit in and my brothers were taken, the lively spark in my father went out, and the monster came nightly.

With the selection I could change my family's lives and my own, and although I hated to admit it, this frivolous competition was the only way I could save myself. I signed my name at the end of the document and neatly placed it back in the envelope it arrived in.

"Kahlen did it come?" yelled my sister, flying into the room. Her energy was less then it had been in the past, but it was still there.

I nodded in excitement, trying to hide the fear that came with the letter. Sophie grabbed my hands in hers and closed her eyes, seeming to pray. I looked down at her hands. They were pale despite the olive tone to her skin and very bony. She couldn't have been 100 pounds soaking wet, and her constant growth upward didn't seem to help.

The Selection was the only way out.

My form was in, along with a picture that I wasn't entirely prepared for. Luckily, I had washed my hair the night before in our freezing tap water and didn't look as greasy as I normally did. My only worry was that I wasn't really smiling that much, so it might look like a mugshot.

After that, we ran our separate ways to work; my mother went to the shoe factory and I went to the farm nearby. A family of Fours owned it, and I loathed the job. The work was always laborious, and the sharp weeds always left my hands bloody and bruised. Even though slavery was outlawed in Illéa, the amount of money I received and the beatings made it almost that.

The Report next friday would probably solidify my life into poverty, and would tear apart my last hope of changing my life, unless by something miraculous I married a Two or Three.

Maybe I'd get picked. Maybe I'd marry a One.

A/N: Hi! I really hope you liked it. I started writing this awhile back but deleted it to restart. This was just a short teaser and please take ten seconds to review so I know if you liked it or not.