Chapter Text
Once upon a time she had been a girl. A girl with teeth too sharp for her smile and eyes too carnivorous for comfort, but a girl nonetheless.
Confessional had burned that girl to cinders with her power, that ceaseless devouring insight, that gift which was no gift at all. It gnawed on the denuded white meat of truth until only bones remained. Now the creature who had been Sarah Livsey crawled through the gluey intestines of Brockton Bay like a scavenger priestess, lit from within by corrosive certainty.
She had gone underground. It was easier than she thought it would be, once her ex-employer left town. Hers was a descent into the soft machinery of knowing too much, into the labyrinth of interpretation, the theatre of half-lit rooms and shifting selves. She had become unmoored, not from reality, but the consensual illusion of it.
She operated out of an abandoned warehouse turned techno-arboretum, a place crisscrossed with wires like vines, screens blooming with static like ghost orchids. Her interface with the world encompassed a dozen glowing windows, while a chorus of filtered surveillance all crooned their secrets in polyphonic dissonance. She was both within and without. She knew where the heroes slept, how their dreams bled into their actions. She knew when the gangs were about to make their move, and why their violence felt like foreplay. And when they were at their most vulnerable, she played her part, as exile, data-gnostic, infernal god of mirrors.
It was late, or early, depending on one’s proximity to despair. Through the gloom, Confessional walked alone in her second skin. The suit clung like ink spilled over her lean frame, deep violet threaded with black filigree that flourished along her shoulders, thighs, and spine like living tendrils. Sleek panelled gauntlets crawled up her elbows. A single stylised eye glared from her chest, and smaller ones dotted her sleeves and back, all angled to catch what the others missed.
Her segmented boots clicked a rhythm on the wet asphalt. Below her, Brockton Bay lay sodden and grey, streets mounded with refuse, neon flickering like the tremulous pulses of some great, drowned heart. The graffiti whispered in tongues she could parse even without her power. Hatred and fear, ideology and delusion.
She passed a boy with a serpent tattooed around his neck. He stared at her, haunted, his face wearing a question he didn’t want answered. She smiled at him. He looked away.
The next tattooed person she encountered wasn’t as smart. She requested a meeting with his boss, more out of courtesy than anything.
He drew his gun, of course, because testosterone was a theology of overreaction. Confessional already knew he would. She knew that the safety was still on, that the revolver was stolen, traced to a break-in last week, and that he’d cry if she told him his mother died of a stroke in the night and nobody had found her yet.
She didn’t tell him that. She told him his girlfriend was sleeping with his brother, which was very likely true.
He tried to shoot her anyway. The gun failed to fire.
Then she told him where his mother’s corpse was, and that she’d be wearing the knockoff designer cardigan he bought her after she complained he never visited.
When he left, she took the revolver. She didn’t feel victorious. She never did. Insight was a wound more than it ever was a weapon. Every truth she extracted from the carcass of human behavior and memory came with its own infection. But pain was ritual; knowledge, sacrament.
Confessional continued on, her power a cathedral echoing with these awful psalms, knowing for certain that she was not watching the city die. She was watching it be reborn. And she—mind-whore, smiling witch of septic data—would be its midwife.
ACT I: Whistle Blown
The spray hissed against Victoria Dallon’s skin, too hot, too loud. She tilted her head back, letting water sluice over her face.
Her reflection in the fogged glass of the shower quivered from more than heat. Her hair clung to her collarbone and shoulders, the pale platinum catching the light in liquid flashes. The rivulets traced lines of accusation down her bare skin, sliding over her like the spectre of someone she had never met.
Fucking Confessional.
The story had broken a month ago, on the first day of summer vacation, just a few hours after Dean had departed for some leadership camp his parents were making him attend as a resume-builder. They’d ended it a while back, so it wasn’t a terrible hardship. But it meant she had been alone when she scrolled through her phone and saw her family’s photogenic faces plastered all over the major news feeds. Her own face featured heavily, below such honeyed headlines as:
No Trial, Just Trauma: Citizens Demand Oversight of New Wave
From Protector to Predator: Dallon-Pelham Legacy in Question After Vigilante Violence
Healing Under Duress? Glory Girl’s Sister Forced to Treat Beaten Suspects
Even more upsetting were the post hoc thinkpieces, the defense she’d never asked for and only damned her case—her supporters freely admitting they loved their heroes brutal, adored their angel with blood on her hands. After all, what was mercy but another performance, they lectured. How dare others shame our Glory Girl, how dare they blanch at the very violence they secretly craved themselves!
When she finally shut off the spray, she barely registered the reprieve. She pressed her palms to the wall, feeling the tiles sweat with condensation, hands shaking.
That wasn’t why she’d done it. It wasn’t.
Securely wrapped in a towel, she stepped into the corridor outside her bedroom. The rest of the house seemed to inhale her. Lemon wax on the floors, lavender diffusers in every room—everywhere, an undertone of disinfectant.
By force of habit, she paused at Amy’s door. Amy didn’t plaster hers with cape-themed vinyl stickers and novelty signs like Victoria did, so it was as bare as the walls surrounding it. That plainness reminded her of Amy herself—steady, enduring, unshowy but always present. Even now, Victoria felt the warm tug of gratitude toward the sister who bore so much of her own shadow without complaint.
Per their mother’s orders, Amy was putting in time at the hospital. It was obvious she didn’t want her daughters being seen together outside of prearranged publicity events, lest the press speculate on what exactly they were teaming up to do.
Oh, the press. The same press that interviewed the criminals she’d left clutching injuries that would have been fatal had it not been for her own bleeding heart. The very same press that censured her sister for tending to them, for stitching flesh and sinew back into something resembling wholeness. Sweet, unwilling Panacea perverting her white magic to pave over Glory Girl’s black work. What was it that the journalist from The Brockton Gazette had called it? A twin act, a vaudeville parody of justice?
It was one thing to point fingers at Victoria. But the moment they came for her sister, she vowed to find the one responsible.
In her bedroom she selected a burgundy blouse, and tucked it into high-waisted jeans artfully worn at the knees and cropped at the ankle to reveal a sliver of milk skin. A narrow metallic belt cinched her waist. And then, because she needed the comfort, she pulled on her favourite sneakers. Her mother threatened to donate them every time she found them in the communal shoe closet, so now they took pride of place under her bed. They were old, rubber scuffed and laces knotted into a permanent snarl. They’d served her faithfully for years, carrying her with the insouciance of someone who could fly but preferred to slum it on the ground for a while.
The simple act of dressing up soothed her more than the shower did, and she could almost stop fuming over how this disaster had put a leash on her for the past month. Her mother had benched her, at least until everything blew over and outraged strangers stopped signing New Wave's official e-mail address up for Wards Outreach newsletter subscriptions.
This was a matter of damage control to her mother, rather than punishment. She’d laid down the law: “The Wards would eat you alive, Victoria. They’d use you as a poster girl, a scapegoat, wring every ounce of scandal from your name. No patrols, no costumes. You’ll sit out until this storm passes. A cooling-off period—it’s standard practice.”
To stand down now, while criminals—and Confessional—still roamed the streets with impunity, felt impossible. It meant conceding that the world’s version of her was the true one: a slavering, reckless animal with a warped sense of justice.
She was not a liability. She was not a mistake to be quarantined. Yet here she was, practically grounded like a child, her entire life’s purpose suspended with the ease of flipping a light switch.
But she was also not on house arrest, her mother couldn’t monitor her all the time, and there wasn’t anything sordid about Victoria Dallon in civvies going on an impromptu flight to clear her head. So out into the city she went.
Channels like Parahumans Online or LeekNet were of no use, she’d found. She wasn’t the sort of cape who enjoyed prowling the digital back alleys of the world—that was the domain of someone like Dragon, or even someone lower-tier with a hacker streak. Even so, she had hoped she might find a breadcrumb. An alias or two rotated across lesser-trafficked forums, a proxy address, a mistyped command line in a darknet ledger. Something human.
She hadn’t gotten that far. As she ascended, she went over what she knew about Confessional, from the online speculation to the secondhand dread of the cops who never filed reports.
Every network is a nerve ending, they said. She doesn’t surf the net, she is the net.
Eyes open in every direction at once.
The obvious place to start had been the journalists, but when questioned, they all claimed they’d received anonymous tips from untraceable sources. Confessional did not demand tithes for the dirty details she doled out about taxpayer-funded child trafficking rings, or for the high-resolution recordings of politicians accepting fat cheques from their constituents. She was measured about it, though—never giving everything up in a single leak, sometimes waiting weeks to drop another bomb reigniting the same scandal. Victoria suspected she delighted in terrorising her victims, like a cat toying with its snared prey.
Some of them deserved it, yes. But not all.
Victoria moved out of sight along scaffolds, swerving past water towers and half-finished construction sites. Below, the streets bustled with midday traffic. Delivery vans rattled over cracked asphalt, pedestrians weaving between them. The air was filthy with exhaust.
Sun bounced off metal rooftops and glass, reflecting the harsh geometry of Brockton Bay’s buildings. She didn’t search at night anymore. Confessional was a creature of daylight, of networks and screens and eyes that never slept. The vigilante’s reach wasn’t diminished by the lack of cover. In fact, it was stronger in the daytime, when streetlights and security cameras were fully operational, when business and bureaucracy were awake and vulnerable. Confessional thrived in the midst of human activity.
At night, Victoria might have walked past the same crook a dozen times without ever knowing it. But by day, every movement, every interaction, every poorly encrypted file could be traced, cross-referenced, amplified.
And so Victoria’s informants were dispersed across liminal zones. The barista on a balcony serving iced coffees, a delivery driver leaning on a truck door, a construction foreman consulting blueprints. Each offered fragments of intel, cautious and coded and individually precious.
Victoria paused atop a water tower, the steel hot beneath her palms, scanning rooftops as she mulled over the clues she’d collected. All of them were routes she could follow through the city’s veins.
At night, she would have been chasing shadows. In the day, she could hunt the ghost itself.
The warehouse was unremarkable from the outside, just another brick-and-steel relic of industrial decline. Stepping through the threshold was like entering another dimension. Inside, the air simmered with the scent of machines and solder. Dust motes swirled leisurely in the shafts of wan daylight that penetrated the grime-darkened windows, caught between the hard lines of metal and the ethereal glow of monitors.
The space had been appropriated and remade with fastidious care. Workstations loomed along the walls, each a nest of overlapping screens and tangled cables. The monitors displayed an endless procession of surveillance feeds—grainy faces caught in the blur of habit, streets stretching into anonymous horizons, banal and intimate all at once.
Lisa’s chair dominated. A high-backed ergonomic throne of black leather framed by polished metal, it faced a luminous digital grid as though presiding over a congregation of data.
Reclining in it, Lisa cast her bloodshot gaze over the screens and immediately winced. Today’s headache had begun as a thrum behind her eyes, abstract at first, like the vibration of a distant engine. Over the course of the morning it had sharpened, spiralling in merciless arcs across her temples and into her jaw, until every thud of her heart landed like a hammer striking bone. Now the edges of the furniture had taken on a subtly wrong angle and the familiar shapes of her desk and chair had become slightly menacing, as if her mind, too, were rebelling against itself.
She needed to stop taxing her power like this.
Lisa looked over her cockpit. On it were dossiers splayed out in the kind of chaos that might suggest diligence to visitors, but was actually just the result of having shoved everything aside to make room for three half-empty cups of instant coffee and an ashtray so overloaded it resembled a postmodern sculpture about lung disease.
She didn’t even like smoking. But when it came to giving her power that extra edge, nicotine served as a passable substitute for amphetamines.
Grudgingly, she leaned over and reached for a pack hanging off the edge of the desk, only for the glare from a nearby screen to slash her vision into jagged shards. Thoughts she had meant to follow—classified reports to download, errands to run—fractured instantly and scattered underfoot. She pressed her palms to her temples, willing the pain to recede.
In the stillness between beats, she became aware of the migraine’s perverse intelligence. It guided her gaze, bent her perception, made the room feel both oppressively real and unreal at the same time. She leaned forward, resting her forehead against her crossed arms, and realised she could do nothing but endure. She counted the beats of her pulse, each one a sadistic marker of time passing.
When she finally looked up, there was a blonde teenage girl standing in front of her.
“Hey,” said recently disgraced superhero Victoria 'Glory Girl' Dallon.
Lisa snaked her hand into her desk drawer to grip her stolen revolver. Victoria’s eyes flicked to follow the movement. She didn’t lunge just yet.
“Can I help you?” Lisa asked, already mentally running through exits. How the fuck did she find me? How did she even get in?
“That would be a first,” said Victoria. She stepped closer. “Confessional.”
Two shots. Take out her forcefield, then incapacitate her, Lisa thought. Or one shot and I run.
There wasn't any point playing coy with her identity. Victoria knew.
Lisa was conscious of how disgustingly far from the mythic Confessional she looked right now. She’d just about wrangled her hair into a ponytail this morning but it was still a mess—oily and darkened at the roots, the shade of mopwater left too long in a bucket, fading into tips stained blue. Nestled beneath her eyes were the unglamorous everyday smudges of sleeplessness, soft half-moons that obviated the need to paint the skin under the eyeholes of her domino mask.
It nettled her that Victoria Dallon would confront her in this state. Victoria herself was in plainclothes with just a little mascara, but infuriatingly, her beauty persisted through comfy cotton and distressed denim.
“So, to what do I owe the honour?” She smiled, showing teeth. “Have I committed a crime, officer?”
“You know very well why I’m here.”
“If this is about a bruised ego, I’m afraid you’ll have to take a number at the front desk.” Lisa gestured encompassingly over the clutter. “As you can see, I’m swamped.”
“You’ve ruined lives,” said Victoria. “Gleefully, I might add.”
“Oh please,” Lisa said, a touch more venomous than she would’ve been if her brain weren’t punishing her for speech. “Don’t pretend you suddenly care about the ethics of insider trading. Boo-hoo, so a couple of three-piece suits have to sell their summer home. The only reason you give a shit now is that you’re the one facing the consequences.”
She took the revolver out of the drawer and set it on her lap, casually, like it was just a prop in their drama. Glory Girl glanced at it but didn't comment.
“You know what’s funny, Glory Hole?” Lisa cocked her head. “You maim people, patch them up, and somehow think the universe owes you a thank-you card. Remember the last guy you decided deserved a… shall we say, career adjustment? You left him bleeding out on the curb while your sister reconstituted his femurs.”
“That guy was a skinhead, and he hurt a lot of people. I stopped him. He hasn’t hurt anyone since, that I can tell.” Victoria tapped her foot. “If that’s your defense, you’re gonna have to try a little harder.”
“Defense? Oh, Vic. No. Observation.”
“You don’t get it.” A flash of disquiet crossed Victoria's face. “My sister—she’d—she could’ve—
“Let’s get to the heart of the matter,” Lisa interrupted. “You think you’re untouchable. That the Dallon sisters’ private little Punch and Broody routine would go unnoticed. Well, I noticed. I even noticed the look on Panacea’s face when she realized she’s just a first responder in your personal warzone. So I called it out. That’s my superpower.”
“And what? That makes you the hero?”
“Damn straight. A better one than you’ve ever been.”
“Really,” Victoria said. “Please enlighten me on how treating people like pawns for your own amusement is heroic. You feed innocent people to the media machine.”
“They’re not innocent,” Lisa said.
“What about their loved ones? Do they deserve the spectacle?”
This was about Panacea, Lisa realised, not a bruised ego. She relented a little. “I don’t pretend it’s a perfect system. But at least I don’t break bones—I just enforce accountability.”
Victoria scoffed. “But you’re still interfering. You’re still manipulating people.”
“Sure. But there’s a difference. When I leak incriminating info, the people involved still have a choice. A corrupt official can respond, a felon can get their shit kicked in through channels that don’t involve mutilation.” Lisa indicated Victoria with a lazy wave. “You, on the other hand, remove choice. You threaten, you maim, and then you force others into complicity. My method is elegant. Yours? Messy. Clumsy. The rule of beasts, really. And yet you still seem proud of it.”
Victoria’s jaw tensed. She shifted her weight, crossing her arms. Before she could get too agitated, Lisa made her shot in the dark.
“Darling, sweetheart, baby, listen to me. Let’s just pause and marvel at the masterpiece that is you.” She framed Victoria’s face with her hands. “The biceps, the aura, the Band-Aid brigade—you’re terrifying, yes, but tragically underutilised.”
Victoria opened her mouth to retort, but Lisa cut her off.
“Now, imagine this: us. You, the glorious muscle. Me, the all-seeing mastermind, AKA the one who keeps us from getting carted off to the slammer. Synergy—no, poetry. I mean, really, inevitable. Can’t you see it?”
“Oh, sure,” Victoria drawled. “Because teaming up with an ego-tripping stool pigeon is exactly how I want to spend my evenings.”
“I prefer truth consultant. Nicer ring to it. And face it, you need one more than ever.”
“Need? I’ve been ridding Brockton Bay of scum long before you slithered onto the scene.”
Lisa sighed, massaging her temples. “Honey, I’m offering salvation disguised as partnership. You’re welcome, by the way.”
“Salvation? You call this salvation? You humiliate me, you drag my sister’s name through the mud, and then—then you act like you just solved world hunger.”
“I did solve world hunger. Metaphorically. The world was starving for honesty. And me exposing your extracurricular activities? High nutritional value.”
“What do you even need muscle for? Weren’t you just preaching pacifism?” Victoria asked. “If your whole schtick is information and exposure, why do you need someone like me? Someone who can… do damage?”
Lisa leaned back in her chair, fingers drumming lightly on polished metal. She let the silence stretch until Victoria’s clear impatience made her smile. “Ah, I knew you’d ask that. Let me put it in terms you can understand.”
Victoria’s arms stayed crossed.
“Information only works if people respect it. You leak the wrong thing, out the wrong person, and suddenly you get retaliation. That’s where you come in.” She tapped the edge of the chair, eyes glinting. “Not because I want you to brutalise anyone, fuck no. But because people need to believe I have teeth. Presence, consequences, whatever you wanna call it. That’s leverage, baby. Fear doesn’t have to be bloody to be effective.”
Victoria’s hands balled into fists. “So you’re saying you’ll use me like a threat?”
“Top of the class.” Lisa leaned back and clapped languidly. “You’d be the visible assertion of power behind the invisible strategy. You make sure cooperation is earned, that disobedience carries risk, and that my ethical stance—the one I actually intend to uphold—isn’t ridiculed by the very people I expose. I maintain authority, and you… make sure no one dares test it.
“Think of it this way: you already know my work is chess. I move pieces. But don’t forget I’m on the board too. Some pieces have the ability to strike on another’s behalf if trouble becomes imminent. That’s you. Not my hand. Not my responsibility. Yours. Convenient, isn’t it? You get to exist in the shadows of violence, while I stay squeaky clean." Lisa leaned forward slightly, voice softer but still smug. “The moral high ground is a sublime perch, G-Hole. But without someone who can enforce the rules when words and evidence aren’t enough, it’s just… empty. And I don’t do empty. That’s why I need you.”
Victoria stared back implacably.
“So.” Lisa spread her arms wide in expectation. “What’ll it be?”
“You know,” Victoria said, “you really love the sound of your own voice.”
She launched herself at Lisa.
Having anticipated this, Lisa already had the revolver raised. She had half a second to aim. Her finger tightened around the trigger and the recoil jarred her shoulder with unexpected force. The shot struck Victoria’s chest, dead center.
For an instant, Lisa felt a surge of triumph. But Victoria reeled only a fraction, her frame absorbing the impact with uncanny resilience even as her forcefield dissolved. The crumpled bullet bounced harmlessly to the floor.
Fire, Lisa’s scrambled brain screeched. Fire again.
Where?
The leg.
Lisa fumbled with the gun and aimed for the knee, just as Victoria lurched out of the way. The bullet missed, ricocheting off a cabinet.
She’d blown her chance. By now the forcefield had to be back online. She threw her monitor at Victoria and made a break for it.
Victoria gave chase. Lisa huffed out a laugh and vanished behind a toppled desk. The cables became whips and snares. She lashed and tripped, swung and twisted, used every nearby wire to disorient her opponent. She flung a keyboard across the room. It narrowly missed Victoria’s shin and struck a monitor instead. It tipped, the screen shattering.
It rankled at Lisa, damaging the computers she’d painstakingly set up to her exact specifications. But possessions could be replaced, unlike her cerebrospinal fluid.
Lisa darted between desks, her mind abuzz with half-baked strategy. She kicked, jabbed, dragged cables, swung monitors, turning the room into a carnival of violent motion. Victoria moved fluidly through this chaos, turning Lisa’s own tricks against her.
Lisa knew this room like the back of her hand, but she wasn't a fighter, and any attempt to use her power made her head feel like it was actively being crushed by a hydraulic press.
Finally Victoria’s hands found Lisa’s shoulders, and she hoisted the smaller girl against a wall of humming CPUs. Sparks leapt across the gap, illuminating her face in a sudden, cruel light. Lisa flailed, tangled in wires.
Victoria backhanded her across the face. She must have dropped her forcefield at some point because the impact didn’t completely pulverise Lisa’s skull, but the pain still nearly knocked Lisa unconscious.
Lisa sprawled across the floor. All she could do was grin. “Better keep going if you wanna make it worth Panacea’s while.”
Victoria stood over her. “Okay,” she said simply.
Lisa’s grin twitched from the pain. “Okay?”
“I think you’re a vindictive, hypocritical bitch,” said Victoria, inspecting her own knuckles with an iron calm. “And you’re lying to yourself if you think you do this out of anything other than your own selfish need for control.”
“But—?”
“But I’d rather be on the same side as you than not. So, okay. I’m in.”
Lisa choked, and a thin ribbon of scarlet trickled from her lips. She turned her head to spit. “If you were going to accept anyway, why beat the shit out of me first?”
Victoria shrugged a shoulder as she moved among the rows of monitors and scattered tech, screens throwing angular light across her face. “Just thought I’d live up to the exposé.”
And that, Lisa decided, cradling her cheek, was fair enough.