The Unrobbable Vault

Four hundred years. That is how long the temple of the Coin God has stood unrobbed, and every thief in the city will tell you that number like it is a law of nature, like the tides, like the fact that bread falls butter-side down. Resa hated that number. She had hated it since she was eleven and hungry, watching priests carry more gold into that temple in a single afternoon than her whole street would see in a lifetime. She had been planning the job, in some corner of her head, every day since. It had taken her nineteen years to get good enough to admit the plan out loud. She admitted it out loud in the back room of a laundry, to five people she did not entirely trust, which was the correct number of people to not entirely trust for a job this size. "Six steps," she said, and laid the first card on the table. "I'll be honest with you about one of them. The God can hear honesty. So five of these are lies, and you're going to have to live them like they're true, or the God will know, and the God does not forgive."