On the Old Alliance Between Power and the Unseen

Every empire kept someone close who could see what the ledgers couldn't. Pharaohs kept dream readers. Kings kept oracles, and paid them considerably better than they paid most of their generals, because a general could only tell you what had already happened. The wiring hasn't changed. Power has simply gotten better at renaming it — a board meeting, a gut check, a call that never makes it into the minutes. The women who find their way to me aren't doing anything their ancestors weren't already doing quietly, at night, in every century that came before this one — asking, in private, the question they weren't allowed to seem uncertain about in daylight.

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