Step One Is a Lie

Resa told them step one with a completely straight face, and it was completely false, and the genius of it was that she needed her own crew to believe it. The Coin God could hear a lie the way you hear a wrong note in a song. So the trick was not to lie to the God. The trick was to never know you were lying. If Den believed, all the way down, that the job was a forgery scam and not a vault break, then when the God reached into Den's mind it would find a forger, honest and complete, and it would relax. Five of her six people would walk into that temple carrying a false job in their heads like a real one. Only Resa would carry the truth, and Resa had spent nineteen years learning to hold a true thought so still that even a god might mistake it for furniture. "You'll hate me," she told them, "when you find out. That's step six. Hating me is part of the plan too."