Free Where There's Fire (Panopolis Book 2) by Cari Z.

again. I stared from her to Maggot. “They’re yours?”
    “Mm-hmm. An unexpected side-effect of my cancer treatments last year.” He smiled thinly. “I was dying of lymphoma. The treatment involved injecting me with parasitic organisms genetically engineered to seek out and consume the tumors. They saved my life, but . . .” He waved his hand at himself. “It wasn’t without consequences. Of course, once the city council realized I’d undergone a rather radical change, they wouldn’t let me be the Mayor anymore.”
    “Oh my god.” My jaw dropped. This was Mayor Bell? But Mayor Bell had been a hearty man, vital and cheerful and larger than life. We’d all been surprised when he’d gone down for corruption charges and been thrown out of office so quickly last year. “You had cancer?”
    “It wasn’t something my aides thought I should share with the general public, so I took treatments in secret. And afterward, well . . . no Super can have dominion over regular folks; it makes them nervous. So the city council drummed up some charges and put me at the disposal of Dr. Wilhelm Steuben.” Maggot grinned when I flinched. “I see you’ve heard of him.”
    “Yeah. I know him.” Dr. Steuben had been the man behind my transformation. He’d changed almost everything about me, and I’d barely spent fifteen minutes in his company. I could only imagine what long-term exposure to that madman would result in. Though . . . I guess I didn’t have to imagine it. I was seeing it right now.
    “Did he mention the Experimentals to you?”
    As a matter of fact, he had. Very briefly, when speaking to a guard while he was getting ready to torture me, but I remembered. “Something about using them to defend the prison.”
    “Something like that,” Maggot agreed. “Experimentals were prisoners, Villains of various abilities, who Dr. Steuben decided to control using me. One maggot for each, somewhere on their bodies. My little helpers are quite venomous, and a bite can kill in under a minute. I control each and every one of them through a psychic link. If an Experimental disobeyed orders, I had to order the maggot to bite. If I disobeyed orders, well . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t need to tell you how uncomfortable the good doctor could make things for a person.”
    “No, you don’t.”
    “I was his slave. We all were,” Maggot continued. “And then you came along, and with some help from your boyfriend here, we escaped.” He tipped his chin down, and looked at me more directly. “And I thought, well, so many of my fellow Supers have already joined me on the righteous path by carrying my little helpers, why stop there? So I kept them, and as new maggots grew I added them to recruits who’ve proven themselves to the cause.”
    “Recruits to what cause?” This was what I didn’t get. “Living in the bliss that’s Z Street? Because it’s not that nice here.”
    Maggot shook his head. “It shouldn’t be nice. I’m not interested in nice, Mr. Dinges. Z Street is the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with Panopolis, so why should I sugarcoat it for anyone? No.” He sat back. “There isn’t a single Hero who owns the rights to themselves anymore. The old ones, the Supers with genuine political power, they’ve been almost completely killed off by now. Businesses just want to use the images, the catchphrases, and make a lot of money off of ’em. You think it’s a coincidence that products started featuring familiar faces when the new mayor came to power?
    “The tax breaks the mayor offered recently? Those’re incentives to keep businesses from negotiating directly with Heroes. His office gives each Hero a city liaison, a goddamn manager to run their marketing, and most of them don’t say a word because they need whatever benefits they’re getting from the corporations, medical or financial or otherwise. The city gets a cut of the cash, the businesses get more than enough in tax relief to