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Every boy in the orphanage tried to look weak and sickly when the Angel visited, but there was no point. She had been taught medicine by her father, Dr. Frankenstein himself. She would poke at them with a girl's delicate finger, look them over with the sharpest clinical gaze, and pronounce them fit donors or not. The blood tests were mere formalities, or rather tests of a different kind. My predecessor had manipulated some to keep safe a boy he had grown attached to, a choice that had led him to the camps in Australia, and me to his post.

I wouldn't make his mistake. The camps might not mean immediate death - with his racial background, he had probably even avoided sterilization - but life, real life, was only to be found in service to the Empire.

The Angel (I couldn't stop myself from using the boys name for her, but never aloud, not even alone) made some quick notes on a clipboard, pushing half a dozen children past the threshold of death so a member of the high nobility, a favored industrialist, or a compliant enough foreign ruler could be pulled back. I could see her mind was elsewhere, but made no comment. The decades since her death and rebirth had not mellowed Lady Frankenstein, if rumor was to be believed; younger-seeming than many of the boys, she was older than me, so I couldn't say.

She gave me the clipboard, already turning away. "That will be all, Director."

"Thank you, Lady Frankenstein," I answered, bowing, but she didn't see and probably did not hear. Although what changes her father had made to her unaging body over time, what powers of mind or sense had been added, and at what cost (and to whom), only the two of them knew, and the Doctor hadn't left his castle in decades. Some said he no longer looked human, and maybe no longer thought like one, if he ever had.

But the vast estates of Castle Frankenstein weren’t where his daughter was going. I could see her helicopter already speeding towards London, where the camera crews were probably already waiting for her arrival for the first of many events that would celebrate Queen Victoria's first century of rule.