“Exactly,” Merritt said. “That’s why we need to hide it.”

“Hide it?” Quinn shook a finger at the sword on Merritt’s hip. “Bags, Merritt! You’re wearing the thing in plain sight!”

Merritt leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Sometimes, the best way to hide something important is to hide it in plain sight. Baraccus wanted to show us that with how he hid the formulas.”

Quinn threw his hands up in frustration. “But there are lots of people who have worked on creating the key out of a sword. A sword is the first thing someone searching for the key would suspect, the first thing they would look for.”

“Not necessarily,” Magda said.

Quinn’s gaze shifted between the two of them. “I’m listening.”

“They only think the key needs to be a sword because that was the theory gleaned from ancient books. I’m the one who came up with it, remember? I’m the one who told people it needed to be a sword.”

“Well there you go. That’s what I mean. Everyone believes it has to be a sword.”

“That’s why we need you to create a more inviting belief,” Merritt said, “something more convincing, something that will cause people to shift their thinking to a better theory of what the key would have to be.”

“A better theory?” Quinn looked intrigued. “You mean send them off track so that they aren’t looking for a sword?”

“Exactly,” Merritt said. “The boxes of Orden were stolen from the safest place anyone could think of to put them. So why were they vulnerable?”

“Because people knew where they were,” Quinn answered. “If you know where something is, you can work on how to steal it no matter how difficult it may be to get to.”

“You’re getting the idea,” Magda said. “What makes the key, in the form of the sword, vulnerable, is that if people know it exists they will look for it. That’s why secrecy is so critical. People won’t look for something if they don’t know it exists.”

“So in place of the sword,” Merritt told him, “we have to give people something else more inviting to look for.”

Quinn lifted a finger. “A diversion.”

Merritt smiled in answer. “It needs to be something they will come to believe is the key to the boxes of Orden. Then we’ll hide it—to make it look all the more important—when in actuality it will be carefully planted, not hidden. Hiding it makes it all the more enticing. If people are all looking for the diversion, they won’t be looking for the real key.”

“In the meantime,” Magda told him, “we’ll have the real key.”