“Whose plight are you taking up this time?” Cate says.

“Miners. Silver miners. Very little has changed for miners since Orwell’s Wigan Pier or even Zola’s Germinal. Only the horses have gotten a break.”

“What horses?” Cate sees her mistake even as these words are passing over her lips, requesting information she is not going to be happy to have.

“Beasts of burden. Pulling the carts. Their trip down was one-way. They worked down there until they died. Always dreaming of running across green pastures.”

Cate doesn’t say anything. She’s afraid there might be more to the horse story. Seneca doesn’t miss this.

“I am sorry I told you this. I forgot what a friend you are to animals. I am too distracted by the sorrows of humans. It’s good there are others to concern themselves with animals.” While this sounds sincere, Cate also catches on a small snag of trivialization. Seneca shifts her chair back to face the table she uses as a desk. Over her shoulder she says, “Maybe you are tired a little from your trip to the pyramid? Maybe you’d like to sleep awhile before dinner?”

Her father says, “Yes, take a nap. I have to go over to the plant. A short meeting.”

“Is the meeting about a color?” Cate says.

“Yes.”

“Is it about a blue?”

“No. It’s about a gray. There are way more meetings about grays than about blues, but they are shorter meetings.”

The nap is a fiction. In these suddenly busy days of her work life, Cate needs to steal every spare minute, even down here, to refine her sets.

Just a few years ago, if she were going to work away from her shop, she would have had to bring drafting tools and a tube of rolled drawings. Now she slips into her backpack a laptop thin as a magazine. Her ideas are now liquid, trickled into a design program, then shot into the cloud. She can work anywhere Wi-Fi hovers.

Seneca is late to dinner, then finally comes through the archway, placing a hand on the plaster in such a graceful way a stranger might not notice she is steadying herself. She has suffered from balance issues for years. At dinner she often wears a light caftan and heavy jewelry, a rolled scarf as a headband. She moves slowly. Her approach is like that of one or another of the three wise men.

As soon as she has made apologies and taken her seat, the door to the kitchen opens for the cook, who bears a salad of nopalitos. Juana is small and elderly in an extreme way. By now she has lost a hard-fought battle with the sun. Her face resembles that of an apple doll. She has abandoned speaking for muttering. Initially, Cate interpreted this as something ancient and important, a blessing on her maybe.