The Veritas Codes Teaser Chapter

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Rubber tires squeaked against concrete as Kelsey turned her Mazda into the north parking garage. One in the morning was late, but not college-Friday late. She shook the fuzziness from her head. One glass of champagne shouldn't have hit this hard — but between the alcohol, weeks of broken sleep, and the constant fear of being watched, she was lucky to be holding a single thought together. Her bed was waiting. She intended to accept its invitation.

She wasn't the only one crawling home. A red Honda ahead of her claimed the last spot on the second level. She circled up to the third, found a gap between a Prius and an F-150 straddling the line, and wedged the Mazda in. Jerk. She muttered it under her breath, shoving her purse through the cracked door and sliding out sideways.

She glanced at the back seat. The cardboard box wasn't going to fit out of either door. Tomorrow. She pinched her eyes shut. It was tomorrow. Homework, labs, laundry, and the day hadn't even started yet. For a second she considered climbing over the seat to grab it anyway to save herself the second trip. A yawn won the argument instead. Later.

She started up the ramp toward the corner stairwell. A car door thudded shut somewhere on the level nearby. Odd; she hadn't heard anyone pull in behind her. She looked back. Nothing. Her hand tightened on the rail at the memory of the note tucked under her wiper two weeks ago. She'd believed the threat was real. She'd been careful since — doubling back on her route tonight, checking her mirrors multiple times. And now, standing here, she couldn't shake the feeling that carefulness had been wasted. That someone had simply been waiting.

She quickened her pace and ducked behind the tallest car she could find. If someone was behind her, she'd let them take the stairwell first and wait them out, then go. She held her breath and listened past her own pulse. Then she heard it: boot heels, unhurried, striking the metal stairs like taps to a metronome. Then they moved to the concrete. Closer.

Kelsey clapped a hand over her mouth before the sound in her throat could escape. She hadn't been paranoid. She'd been right.

Every instinct screamed run but her mind fought it, bargaining for a plan first. Her dorm was out; they knew where she lived, and four walls wouldn't stop this. The car. One floor up, and she could drive until she found somewhere safe. She found the longest key on her ring and held it between her knuckles, ready to swing if it came to that.

The footsteps peeled away toward the far stairwell. She moved low, weaving between cars, past the last one before her own exit but a sound rose directly behind her.

Her grip crushed down on the keys. A jagged edge bit into her palm and drew blood.

This was not part of the plan.

Sunday
Chapter 1
Maggie's heart slammed against her ribs. Keep going. Don't stop. Don't stop. The light pole was close now. Thirty seconds. Fifteen. Five. She slapped it and staggered to a halt, fighting the pull of the grass beside the sidewalk, soft and inviting and entirely too tempting to collapse onto. She checked her watch and killed the timer. A minute faster than her last three-mile run. Not much. But something.

Hands laced behind her head, she pulled in long breaths of crisp October air and let her heart rate settle back toward normal. West campus on the weekends was her favorite kind of quiet—no dormitories, no music bleeding from open windows, just birdsong and wind moving through the trees. She wiped her face with the neck of her T-shirt, wringing the sweat from her temples, and started the walk back to her dorm as her breathing steadied.

She loved campus in the fall. Her parents used to bring her and her brother to homecoming every year. At twelve she couldn't imagine anything better than being a college kid herself one day. Reality had other plans. Freshman year had been a slow-motion collision. A disastrous sorority rush week snowballed into rejection from every other student organization she'd tried ending the year with a GPA that never quite recovered. Some legacy. Daughter of a student body president who'd also captained the baseball team, and a Gamma Sig president who'd graduated as a Dean's Scholar, and Maggie couldn't manage to excel at anything.

This year, she'd promised herself over the summer. This year I make an effort. The effort had taken the shape of an RA job and a spot on the Regulator newspaper. Six weeks in, it was working. Life felt like it belonged to her again.

She paused at the foot of her dorm stairs and took in the courtyard. College, in miniature: a knot of guys volleying a ball back and forth on the half-sand, half-dirt court outside Tucker Hall, and clusters of students sprawled on the grass with blankets and snacks and nowhere else they needed to be. The STK complex, also called the Stack, was three residence halls arranged in a U: Sterling on the left, Tucker in the center, Kheeler on the right, all their doors and open-air balconies facing inward, like the buildings themselves had turned to face each other for company.

"Hey, Miss Margaret."

The voice came from behind her, footsteps heavy on the pavement, and Maggie froze. Almost no one on campus used her full name. Only one person said it with that particular southern drawl — the one that did something unfair to her pulse. And now she was suddenly, painfully aware of every dried bead of sweat on her skin, of exactly how she must smell after an hour-long run. She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, then tried and failed to smooth the rest back into her ponytail.

"Hey, Colton. How's it going?" She turned, aiming for casual. She wasn't sure she landed it.

"Oh, you know. Livin' the life." He tossed a volleyball into the air and caught it without looking, ambling toward her. Colton Higgins could've worn a burlap sack and still stopped conversations. It wasn't just his tousled blond hair or sky-blue eyes, it was that smile. Straight, white, effortless, the kind that made you forget what you'd been about to say with lips that looked like they never needed Chapstick. Behind him trailed a broad-shouldered, dark-haired guy engrossed in his phone.

"This is my roommate, Dylan." Colton gestured with the ball. "His phone's basically an extra limb at this point." He tried again, this time addressed to the crown of Dylan's head. "Dylan, this is Maggie. Second floor RA."

"Hey," Dylan said, without looking up.

"Hi." Maggie smiled at him anyway. "Volleyball?" She heard how obvious the question was the second it left her mouth.

"Sunday tradition." Colton spun the ball on one finger. "Floor-versus-floor bragging rights."

Dylan pocketed his phone and crossed his arms, unveiling a full sleeve of tattoos — a cartoon yellow bird bleeding into a cluster of skulls further up. His eyes kept drifting to the court. "Gonna go warm up." He held his hands out for the ball.

"Tell everyone I'll be right there." Colton lobbed it to him. Dylan was already walking away before he caught it.

"You coming from the rec center?" Colton nodded at her running clothes.

"No, I finished up a run on west campus. It's quiet out there on weekends."

"So you're a runner." He said it like a discovery. "Not me. I don’t run. I'm strictly a gym-rat type."

"I can tell." The words were out before she'd fully considered where they were headed. She'd meant it as an observation about his shoulders, his arms, but heard how it sounded the instant it landed. "I mean…you clearly work out. Not that you don't run, I'm sure you could, your legs look good. I mean your muscles are good… Stop talking. She didn't. "You're very proportional." She concluded. 

Maggie wanted the courtyard to swallow her whole.

"Thanks. I think." He laughed, easy about it in a way that made it worse. "I do try to stay proportional."

Heat crawled up her neck. She was still hunting for some kind of save when a voice boomed from the court. "Higgins! We need you!"

"Duty calls." He was already backing away. "See you at the meeting tonight."

Maggie managed a smile and nothing else, too afraid of what might come out if she opened her mouth again.

She took the stairs to her floor two at a time and let her forehead rest against the front door once she reached it. "I'm so awkward," she muttered into the wood. Inside, her roommate was curled in their tiny living area, a textbook open on her lap, a bowl of Frosted Flakes balanced on top of it, red curls clipped up in a haphazard knot.

"Bad workout?" Sarah asked, reading Maggie's face.

"Colton run-in."

"And?"

"I told him he was proportional." Maggie ground the heels of her hands into her eyes. "I ramble when I'm nervous. It's a whole thing."

Sarah snorted. "Could've been worse. Proportional is not an insult."

"It's not exactly a compliment either. His face is basically kryptonite for my prefrontal cortex. One more encounter and I'm going to start communicating exclusively through mime." Maggie dropped into the plaid armchair. "Wait, did you just wake up?" Sarah was still in her orange-and-red flannel pants.

"Long weekend."

"How'd the tournament go?"

Sarah shrugged, the kind of shrug that meant fine, but. "Almost placed. Would've done better if I'd actually trained."

Sarah had joined the martial arts team the year before but had only made the tournament roster this year. Dedication Maggie admired and mildly feared, ever since they'd bonded freshman year over back-to-back-to-back episodes of Gilmore Girls. 

"I know for a fact you could still kick my ass," Maggie said, then followed up with, "I need a shower."

"Yeah. You really do." Sarah wrinkled her nose.

"Hey!" Maggie flung a throw pillow at her head; Sarah snatched it out of the air without looking up. "That's the smell of hard work."

Sunday evenings always came with a bundle of nerves but a built-in excuse to be in the same room as Colton. They'd met the week before residence hall move-in, under circumstances Maggie still wasn't sure she'd fully lived down. She'd stacked her last moving boxes too high to see over, caught the lip of the entryway with her toe, and gone sprawling, boxes exploding across the hallway floor.

"Nice swan dive," a voice had said from somewhere above her, amused. "You okay?"

From the ground, all she could see was a white Converse. Her toe throbbed up into her ankle. "Yeah, I'm fi—" And then she'd looked up into Colton's face and lost the rest of the sentence entirely.

"You hit your head?" His tone had dropped, gone careful, as he crouched to help her sit up.

"No. Just my toe." She'd pulled her foot in to check for blood. "There goes my Riverdance career."

"Good. Your sense of humor's intact, at least." His eyes had crinkled with laughter as he started scooping her scattered things back into the crushed box. "I'm Colton. RA on one. And you're..." He'd squinted at the Sharpie scrawl on the side of the box. "Margaret?"

"I go by Maggie."

He'd handed the box back with a grin and that drawl already doing its damage. "I still think I’ll call you Margaret. You have a good day."

Since then, their run-ins had been sparse — a hallway here, a Sunday meeting there. He'd smile, she'd attempt something like flirting, and they'd end up talking about the weather or some throwaway pop culture headline that somehow, in the moment, felt like it mattered enormously. Afterward she'd replay every second. Had he smiled at the joke, or just smiled? She'd catalogued him anyway, piece by piece: junior, business major, from Atlanta, obsessed with baseball, black Toyota Tundra, Oreos but never coffee.  The fact that they had the same orange Sutton-branded phone case felt, in her more delusional moments, like a sign they were #couplegoals.

If her taste in movies meant anything, she was already living inside the opening act of a rom-com. She just needed the plot to catch up.

After her shower, Maggie studied her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Brown hair below her shoulders, brown eyes, and a face she'd long ago filed under plain. A layer of tinted moisturizer and two coats of mascara was enough makeup for a Sunday afternoon. Casual but cute, she told herself, digging through a closet that offered fewer options than she'd like, and landed on dark jeans with a cream cable knit sweater. She checked the time. Still enough of it to grab a calculus study guide off campus before the meeting — and to drag her best friend Milo along.

Maggie: Off campus run?

Milo: I got stuff to do

Maggie: We'll get coffee

Milo: Ok fine.

Maggie: See you in 10

She pocketed her phone and dug keys out from under a pile of papers on her desk. One of the genuine perks of the Stack was its attached garage. It was invaluable for quick off campus errands and a lifesaver for torrential downpours. 

"Hello, Henry." She patted the taillight on her way past. Her phone buzzed as she reached for the door handle — luckily not Milo cancelling, just a meeting reminder from the third-floor RA. She slid it back into her pocket and caught a flash of something metallic under the car beside hers.

Maggie crouched and picked it up: a necklace, heavier than it looked, its pendant a four-petaled flower set behind a burst of rays like a compass rose. The chain had snapped at the clasp. It could've come from anyone, the garage had no assigned spots, but there was something almost deliberate about the design, something that nagged at her like a word on the tip of her tongue. She photographed it and uploaded the picture to the university's lost-and-found page.  Sutton Socials was one of the small conveniences of a school that had fully embraced its own social media platform. Then she cleared an empty coffee cup out of the console, tossed it on the passenger floorboard, and dropped the necklace into the cup holder.

Milo was waiting on the concrete benches at the southside pickup circle, head bent over his phone. Maggie rolled down her window. "Hey, sexy." She playfully cat called. 

He looked up, rolling his deep brown, heavily lashed eyes—eyes he knew exactly how to use to get his way. Before climbing in, he paused to check his dark chestnut hair in the back window's reflection, stepping down without a second thought to crush an abandoned coffee cup underfoot. "What's this?" He asked, reaching for the necklace.

"Found it in our parking lot. Can't tell if it's real or costume jewelry."

He turned it over, testing the weight. "Feels heavy enough to be real gold. Could be worth something." He tilted it toward the light, frowning slightly at the emblem. "That’s a very interesting design.”

"It’s like a lily crossed with a fleur-de-lis, maybe? It's bugging me…I feel like I've seen it before." She couldn't place where.

"What's weird, though." He turned the chain in his fingers. "This chain doesn't match the pendant. Look at the color difference. The flower has tarnish, actual age on it. The chain's brand new." He handed it back. "What are you going to do with it?"

"Posted it on the lost-and-found page. Hopefully whoever owns it sees it." She tucked it into her back pocket at the next light. 

"How was the trip home?"

"Good. Bryce made varsity starter, and Dad's deep into some health kick that's making Bryce lose his mind." She pictured her little brother, sixteen but much bigger than her, choking down a tofu burger with real hatred in his eyes. "How was your weekend?

Milo's whole face lit up, like he'd been waiting all day to be asked. "You will not believe what ex I ran into at Cosmo's last night."

"Milo, I can't keep your list of boys straight."

"Ohh…Nothing straight about my list of boys, Maggie." He was already off, narrating the previous night scene by scene, and Maggie let herself sink into it. Drama followed Milo the way weather followed everyone else.

She'd met Milo junior year of high school, right after his family moved to her hometown. She'd been assistant stage director for Bye Bye Birdie; he'd been Conrad, and the crowd had belonged to him from his first entrance. He had the kind of easy, boy-next-door charisma that made people rearrange themselves around him without him ever seeming to try. For reasons she'd never fully understood, he'd decided early on to bring her with him wherever he went. Every party he got invited to, she got invited also. By senior year, over a two a.m. PreCal cram session fueled by the grocery store snack aisle, they'd crowned themselves M&M. College acceptance to the same school had sealed best friendship.

By the time they hit the drive-thru at Java Jitters, Milo was only halfway through his account of running into Alex, his summer fling, now apparently attached to someone new. What had probably been a three-minute exchange in real life had been reconstructed, in the retelling, into something closer to Shakespearean tragedy. He paused just long enough to hand his dad's black Amex to the barista before diving back in.

By the bookstore parking lot he'd moved on to a full roster of hookups and breakups involving people Maggie had never met and would likely never meet, and she still didn't mind. His rambling was better company than the quiet of her own love life.

Forty minutes after they'd left campus, Maggie eased her Explorer back toward the dorm drop-off, only to find the street ahead choked with students, all of them turned toward something happening farther up the block. She followed their eyeline and finally saw it — three squad cars and an ambulance, parked outside Milo's dorm.