Free City of Lost Dreams by Magnus Flyte Page A

unable to die myself?”
    “I would assure you that this is a delusion. Not common, maybe, but one I’ve seen before, with varying specifics. I would tell you that such delusions can be treated.”
    Nico looked at her and she laughed shyly.
    “I’m a social worker. My name is Lucinda, in case you’ve forgotten. Lucinda Smythe-Crabbet.”
    He had forgotten. There were just too many names. And this creature had three of them. And a title, he now recalled.
    Really, Nico thought, after bidding Lady Lucinda a fare-thee-well outside the Ritz, he had always acted rashly when it came to women. You would think that after a couple of centuries he would have gotten this under better control, but no, humans were built to be irrational and could evolve only so far, no matter how long you lived. You might get past one or other of the big three—desire for love, fear of death, belief in God—but not all three at once. Buddhist monks came close, and Nico had met some severely autistic children who had surpassed the human condition, but Buddhism required intense meditation (which he was far too Epicurean to practice) and the other was denied to him by virtue of his genetic makeup, imperfect and frozen as it was.
     • • • 
    A t eleven a.m. Nico presented himself at gate A of the east wing of Blythe House, the massive Victorian building that had once been a National Savings Bank and was now used as storage for the spillover collections of a number of museums. The red and white brick edifice was topped with coils of barbed wire. From the outside it looked like an insane asylum. The inside was even worse: dirty glazed yellow tile, crumbling staircases, dimly shadowed corridors. But it had quite a lovely, cheerful staff, and all one needed to gain admittance to have a look at a certain object from the Wellcome Collection was an appointment. Once buzzed in, Nico made his way to the porter’s office, presented his credentials, and received a yellow plastic visitor’s pass. He was met by a Miss Ponds, who was delighted to show him the object he had requested.
    “I expect you’ve been to see the permanent collection at the Euston Road museum?” she chirped. “It’s wonderful. But of course, it’s only a tiny portion of what Henry Wellcome gathered during his lifetime. He had agents all over the world hunting down artifacts, curiosities, medicines, tools, anything to do with the human body. Most of this would seem very primitive and wrongheaded to us now, of course. But it’s a fascinating glimpse into the history of medicine. There were over a million objects in the collection, you know.”
    Nico did know. He had been an agent for Henry Wellcome in the early 1900s and had once spent a harrowing six months in Khartoum in his employ. Henry had been the first to market medicine in tablet form to the general public, and his pharmaceutical company had made him immensely rich. The man had been obsessed with immortality, was totally without a sense of humor, and had bizarre notions of temperance, insisting that none of his employees touch alcohol. Despite all that, Nico had rather liked him. Like most true eccentrics Wellcome had fewer prejudices about the differences of others, at least other
men
, and had treated Nico well, even making one of his custom medicine/tool chests in just his size. He still had it.
    Miss Ponds was punching a security code into a door. Security here was very good, no need for cameras in any of the individual rooms, which was lucky for him. Miss Ponds gave him a pair of plastic gloves and they stepped inside a narrow cell lined with shelves.
    “Now, let’s see . . .” she said, bending down. Nico whipped a syringe out of his pocket and stuck it firmly into Miss Ponds’s conveniently upturned ass.
    “Oops-a-daisy,” she said, before collapsing on the floor.
    Nico ran his eyes over the shelves. He had requested to look at a particular specimen: a stuffed ram’s head mounted on wheels. The top portion