Rook

a result of my weeks and weeks of after-hours studying and reviewing and anal-retentive tracings of moneys, I have found another irregularity, one that may be big enough to justify destroying me.
    And as soon as I’ve taken an aspirin, I am going to chase it down.
    Yours with a headache,
    Me
     
    W ell, this is going to be much nicer than the homemade sandwich I brought to work,” said Myfanwy after they’d been ferried to the most exclusive restaurant in the city and seated in a pool of sunshine. “Shantay’s an interesting name. Is it short for something?”
    “Not so far as I know,” said Shantay. “Why, is yours short for something?”
    “Myfanwy? What could it be short for?”
    “God alone knows, but people’s names are weird. Especially those made-up names.”
    “Is your name made up?” Myfanwy asked curiously.
    “No,” said Shantay.
    “So what kind of name is it?”
    “Uh, Shantay comes from French,” said Shantay, accepting a glass of wine from an obsequious waiter.
    “And what’s the Petoskey part? You don’t look Polish.”
    “It’s Chippewa, means ‘the Rising Sun.’ Don’t feel bad, it always confuses people.”
    “At least you can be relatively certain that you’re pronouncing yours correctly.”
    “Yeah, where
does
Myfanwy come from? Is it Scottish?”
    “Welsh.”
    “Really? I know nothing about the Welsh,” said Shantay conversationally.
    “No, me either.”
    “Didn’t your parents tell you about your heritage?” asked the American Bishop distractedly as she beckoned the waiter back over. “My folks are always telling me about my various cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Actually, we’ll take the whole bottle.” This last part was said to the waiter, who was clearly going to be earning his tip today.
    “I don’t actually know my parents,” said Myfanwy, carefully adjusting her sunglasses. The terrace of this restaurant was
the
place to be eating in London of a sunny afternoon. The air was cool, but elegant heaters had been set up. Normally, one needed to be extremely famous to get a table on the terrace, but somehow, Ingrid had managed to cultivate very good relationships with every restaurateur in the city. When Myfanwy and Shantay turned up, one carrying a credit card that appeared to be made out of actual gold and the other looking like a Nubian goddess, they had quickly been placed in the favored spot, seated ahead of a group of shrill movie stars who had apparently been waiting for ten minutes.
    “You don’t know your parents?” Shantay repeated.
    “No, I was taken from them at the age of nine,” said Myfanwy, hazarding a taste of the wine.
    “Oh my God, I forgot. That’s what you do here, isn’t it?” said Shantay in horror.
    “Mm-hm,” confirmed Myfanwy.
    “You know, not to be rude,” said Shantay. “But I really can’t believe that you take children from their parents.”
    “It’s tradition,” Myfanwy replied, deciding on a food item thathad a long and detailed menu description. If she was going to be charging massive amounts to the Checquy expense account, she wanted something that would involve a lot of work for the chef. “People like us are sort of considered to be the property of the nation.”
    “Well, we had a similar tradition over in the States—people as property. And then we had a little war that sort of established that tradition would end.”
    “Of course,” said Myfanwy. At that moment, a waiter appeared and took their orders—a procedure that took longer than usual because both women insisted on reading out the descriptions of the food in their entirety.
    “So do you remember your parents?” said Shantay once the waiter had tottered away, weighed down with culinary adjectives.
    “Not at all,” said Myfanwy, with complete honesty.
    “And that doesn’t bother you?” asked Shantay.
    “Not really,” said Myfanwy, shrugging. She wondered vaguely how Thomas had felt. “So how did
you
end up in the Croatoan?”
    “I tested early. We have this whole program—very thorough. We’ve got so few manifestations that we can’t afford to miss any possibilities. Anyway, there my parents were, in Flint, Michigan. Ever been there?” she asked suddenly.
    “I think I’ve heard of it,” said Myfanwy. “Wasn’t there a unicorn running around there last year?”
    “Nah, that was East Lansing,” said Shantay dismissively. “Anyway, back when I was little, my parents were having a pretty hard time of it, especially