Work Text:
Myka and Pete are in Casper, Wyoming, searching for J.R.R. Tolkien's paperweight, which had eluded two previous pairs of agents. Turns out, it's damn hard to track an artifact that turns the holder invisible. But this time, things are different. They have the YouTube video of the guy using the artifact (which combined with Claudia's face-recognition algorithm means they have his name, address, and any other info they could possibly need), and they have MacPherson's knockoffs of Timothy Leary's glasses.
More accurately, Myka has the glasses and Pete is trying to grab them off her face.
"Just let me use them for five minutes!"
"Absolutely not," she replies, eyes focused on their target's house.
"One minute, then?" Pete whines.
"Artie would kill me."
"Artie doesn't have to know."
"He'd find out," Myka says. "He specifically told you not to use these, remember? Something about you abusing the real ones and turning him into a walrus while he had appendicitis?"
"It wasn't like that! He made me take them off before he even had an appendix."
"Shut up."
"Really, it's--"
"No, I mean shut up," Myka says, gesturing to the sidewalk in front of them, where their target is walking.
"What? I don't see any-- oh. Right," Pete says, scrunching up his face the way he does when he feels particularly sheepish.
Their target enters the house, and Myka slides the glasses down her face, just for comparison's sake. The door seems to close on its own.
She puts the glasses back on and nods at Pete, and they leave the car and go to do their job.
They get back not long afterward -- since the paperweight makes its holder pathologically attached to it after extended use, it is easier to use the Tesla than to talk it out -- and as she opens the passenger side door, the words "LOOK UNDER THE SEAT" flash on the glasses. Maybe a little of Pete has rubbed off on her from her time in his body, because she knows that whatever is under the seat is intended for her alone.
She takes the glasses off, stashes them in their case, and lets them "accidentally" slide into the gap between her seat and the passenger door. Forty miles later, when they stop for gas and Twizzlers, she uses the excuse to root around under the seat and find the folded paper packet. In neat, familiar capital letters, it says her name.
She doesn't have time to open it then. They reach Leena's shortly after three that morning -- Casper isn't far enough away that Artie would spring for a hotel or let them use one of the travel-aid artifacts -- and as soon as she hears Pete snoring from the other room, she puts on a pair of gloves and opens the packet.
A silver ring falls into her hand. It is has no jewels and no engravings that Myka can see, but there is writing inside the packet, so she opens the packet and reads.
Myka--
Try putting this ring down on something that's been written on. I don't know where it comes from, but I found it in Portland. Every test I know of indicates it's harmless. I thought you might find it useful, if not for work, then for your personal reading.
There is no signature. There doesn't have to be.
Myka grabs a book off her shelf -- a well-worn copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes that she re-reads every couple of years -- opens it to a random page, and sets the ring on it. The entire text of the page appears vertically before her, illuminated and magnified.
Well, that solves the "tiny text" problem, at least. But it adds a new problem: what to tell Artie?
Myka thinks of the grappling gun in aisle 477-J and sighs. Maybe just this once what Artie doesn't know won't hurt him.
She'll keep the ring overnight, and run all the tests she knows on it in the morning. After that, she'll see what happens.
She doesn't sleep that night.