Nice. 06:31.

The terminal at Nice Côte d'Azur has a particular quality of morning light.

It comes through the glass at a low angle — the airport sits close to the sea, and in May the early sun comes off the water before it comes off anything else. The arrivals hall is full of it. Warm. Almost insistent.

Sofia's body does not register this as morning.

Her body registers this as the middle of the night with the lights on.

She moves through the terminal with the specific efficiency of someone who has cleared European arrivals many times — the particular geometry of it, which queue, which lane, the documents already accessible before the officer asks. She is not tired in the ordinary sense. She is displaced. There is a difference. Tired is a deficit. Displaced is a mismatch. The body has everything it needs. It is simply in the wrong time.

Immigration takes longer than it should.

She stands in the non-EU queue and watches the hall fill with the specific mixture of a morning arrival — the business travelers already checking phones, the families reassembling their children and their luggage, the solo travelers who have learned to go internal during the wait. The overhead lighting is fluorescent and flat, contradicting the warm light coming through the glass at the far end of the hall.

She becomes aware of the man from the flight when he joins the queue two positions behind her. Not because he does anything. Because of the same quality of stillness. The tablet is in his bag now. He stands without performing the waiting — no phone, no shuffling, just present.

She does not turn around. She is aware of him the way you are aware of weather.

The officer takes her passport. Looks at it. Looks at her. Returns it.

She moves through.

Outside the secure zone the light hits differently.

She finds a café, orders an espresso, sits with it by the window. The cup is small and the coffee is correct — darker than Miami, less sweet, a different relationship with bitterness. She drinks it standing at the counter in the French manner and then sits anyway because her body needs a moment to stop moving.

06:52 local.

00:52 Miami.

Her biological clock is at its lowest point. Core body temperature reaches its floor around 4am and has not yet begun climbing. Cortisol is flat — the awakening response has not fired because her body has not woken. It has simply continued. There is a difference between having been awake for many hours and having woken. The cortisol response requires the transition. The shift from sleep to waking. The biological declaration of a new day.

She has not made that declaration yet. Her body will not make it for hours.

This is why she will not dose until midday.

Not because the protocol says midday. The protocol says morning. But her morning is not at 06:52 Nice time. Her morning — the cortisol morning, the biological morning that the compounds are calibrated to — will arrive at approximately 12:00 local. That is when Miami 06:00 maps to Nice time on Day 1. That is when the peak will fire. That is the window.

She has checked the app once. The line was there: Dose window: 12:00 local. She does not need to check it again.

She takes a taxi to the hotel.

The Promenade des Anglais in early morning has a quality she has always found slightly melancholic — the wide boulevard, the pebble beach, the sea so immediately present and so indifferent. The parasols are not yet open. A few runners. A woman with a dog. The hotel facades in pale yellow and white catching the low light.

Nice is a city that was Italian until 1860. The architecture remembers this even if the signage doesn't. She has been here enough times to notice the traces — the particular green of the shutters, the way the old town crowds toward the water, the Baroque churches tucked into streets too narrow for them.

France moved its clocks in 1940. The Germans moved them, specifically — to align occupied France with Berlin, with Central European Time. After liberation the clocks stayed. A political decision made under occupation, retained in peacetime, still in effect. The sun in Nice at solar noon in May is not directly overhead until nearly 2pm local time. The clocks and the sky have disagreed for eighty-six years.

Sofia's body disagrees with the clocks too. For different reasons. For six days.

The hotel room is cool. The curtains are heavy and she draws them against the insistent Mediterranean light. The small black case goes immediately into the minibar, which she has confirmed in advance accepts the temperature setting she needs. She checks the temperature. Correct. She does not feel relief exactly. She feels the quiet resolution of a variable that had been running open.

The cold chain: approximately sixteen hours at ambient since she packed the case at home yesterday afternoon. Within window for all three compounds. The case is now refrigerated. The clock resets.

She sits on the edge of the bed.

Her body thinks it is 01:30.

The room is very quiet. The hum of the minibar. Traffic on the Promenade, distant. The particular silence of a hotel room in a city you are not yet in synch with — the sounds are correct but the timing is wrong, like watching a film with the audio slightly delayed.

She does not try to sleep. This is intentional.

Sleeping now — at 01:30 biological time, after a night flight during which she has already slept — would deepen the misalignment. Would tell the body: darkness is here, night is now, anchor here. She cannot afford to anchor here. She needs to let the body drift forward, one hour per day, toward Nice time. Sleeping now would be drift in the wrong direction.

Instead she lies down. Closes her eyes. Does not sleep.

This is a skill.

At 11:40 she showers, dresses, goes down.

The hotel has a small terrace facing the sea. She sits in direct sunlight, which is the other half of the intervention — light exposure in the morning of her destination, even though her body does not experience this as morning, begins the process. The photoreceptors send the signal regardless of what the cortisol is doing. It is the first day's message to the suprachiasmatic nucleus: the day starts here now. Not in Miami. Here.

The nucleus will not believe it yet. It will begin to register it.

At 12:04 she feels the shift.

Not dramatic. Not a surge. Just a change in the quality of the air, internally — a slight lift, a subtle sense of readiness. The cortisol awakening response, delayed by six hours, arriving on Miami schedule mapped to Nice time. The body declaring its morning six hours after the sky already did.

She takes the injection at the table, unhurried, the sea in front of her, a second espresso cooling beside her hand. The system is open now. The compound will land correctly.

A text from a colleague in Monaco. She replies briefly.

The man from the plane is sitting two tables away. She does not know when he arrived. He has an espresso and nothing else and he is looking at the sea with the same quality of attention she noticed on the plane — not tourist attention, not performance. Just looking.

She does not say anything.

Neither does he.

The sea is very blue and the light is doing what Mediterranean light does at midday in May, which is everything.