Five A.M.

The ROTC office is on the ground floor of the Faculty of Law building, behind a door that has no signage except a small, laminated card that reads PROGRAMA DE RESERVA — CITES PREVIA. Valentina has walked past this door exactly twice in her first life, both times without stopping, both times with a private flicker of something she immediately reclassified as impracticality.

She stops now.

The person inside is Sergeant Marta Vidal, a woman in her mid-forties who manages university recruitment for the Spanish Army Reserve with the energy of someone who has heard every excuse and found none of them particularly original. She looks up when Valentina enters and does not adjust her expression.

"Tienes cita?" (Do you have an appointment?)

"No," Valentina says. "But I have fifteen minutes before my next class, and I'd like to know what the application involves."

Sergeant Vidal studies her for a moment with the particular assessment of a recruitment officer — looking for conviction, not enthusiasm, which are different things and only one of them is useful. Then she gestures at the chair across from her desk.

"Fifteen minutes," she says. "Sit down."

The programme is what Valentina already knows it to be: two years of training alongside her degree, a commitment to weekend exercises and a summer camp in the second year, a service obligation afterward. The scholarship supplement covers forty percent of her remaining tuition. Sergeant Vidal delivers this information with the cadence of someone reciting it for the four hundredth time, watching Valentina's face for the moment the hours register as a dealbreaker.

The moment doesn't come.

"The physical assessment," Valentina says. "When is the next one?"

A beat. Vidal recalibrates slightly. "November fourth. You have three weeks."

"What does it cover?"

Vidal slides a single sheet across the desk. Valentina reads it the way she reads contracts now — which is to say, completely. Two-kilometer run, push-ups, sit-ups, and a basic coordination assessment. Standards for women under twenty-five. She maps the numbers against the body she is currently occupying: twenty years old, relatively fit from a lifetime of walking everywhere because the metro was expensive, not strong in any way.

Three weeks. It is tight but not impossible.

"I'll be there," she says.

Sergeant Vidal takes back the sheet. "We'll see," she says, which is not dismissive — it is, Valentina recognizes, the only honest answer to a statement of intent.

She leaves the office with four minutes to spare before her lecture.

She begins running the next morning at five-fifteen.

The Parc de la Ciutadella at that hour belongs to a specific category of people: the serious athletes who train before the city wakes, the dog walkers who prefer solitude to conversation, and occasionally a student who has decided and is trying to outrun the version of herself that would reconsider it. The air is cold and sharp in Barcelona in late October, when the summer has finally accepted that it is finished.

She is not fast. Her lungs inform her of this immediately and at length.

She runs anyway.

By the end of the first week, she can complete the two kilometers without stopping, which is the floor, not the goal. She adds push-ups in her room at night, which her downstairs neighbor presumably appreciates. She adjusts her food — more protein, fewer of the pastries she bought from the bakery below her building every morning in her first life because they were there and she was twenty and consequences felt theoretical.

Isabel notices on Friday.

They are in the campus cafeteria when Isabel looks up from her tray and says, with the attentiveness she applies to changes in the people around her: "You look different."

"I've been running."

"Since when?"

"This week."

Isabel tilts her head. "Because of the ROTC thing?"

"Because I wanted to."

A pause. Isabel stirs her coffee, which she does when she is processing something she doesn't want to react to too quickly. "I didn't know you liked running."

"I'm finding out," Valentina says.

This is true in the narrow literal sense — she does not particularly like running — and entirely true in the larger one. She is finding out what she is capable of in a body that has not yet learned its own limits. Every morning at five-fifteen in the Ciutadella, she is taking inventory of a different kind: not the bag and the phone and the cracked screen, but the actual machinery of herself. What she can push. What pushes back.

"David thinks it's a phase," Isabel says, with the lightness of someone delivering information that is not their opinion.

Valentina looks at her. "You've talked about it with David."

"He asked how you were. I mentioned it."

The sentence is structured correctly. It is kind and casual and offers nothing to object to. Valentina nods once, picks up her fork, and changes the subject to Isabel's seminar on consumer behavior, which Isabel is happy to discuss at length. By the time they part outside the cafeteria twenty minutes later, Isabel is laughing about something her professor said and the conversation about David has been thoroughly buried.

Valentina notes, privately, that David asking how she is doing two days after she mentioned the ROTC programme is not a coincidence. David does not ask how people are doing out of idle curiosity. He asks how they are doing when he wants to know if his interventions are working.

She files this, too.

On November fourth, she arrives at the assessment site at seven forty-five, fifteen minutes early, in the university sports complex on the north end of campus.

There are eleven other students. She is the only woman.

She is aware of this in the way you are aware of weather — as a condition of the environment, not a statement about your chances. She did not come here to be the only woman. She came here to pass the assessment. These are related facts but not identical ones.

Sergeant Vidal is there, clipboard in hand, with the expression of someone who has stopped being surprised by who shows up and who doesn't.

"Serra," she says, checking the name without looking up. "You came."

"I said I would," Valentina says.

Vidal makes a mark on her clipboard. "They all say that."

The run is harder than the park. The assessment track is timed and witnessed, and the eleven other students are mostly faster. Valentina finishes the two kilometers in eleven minutes and forty seconds, which clears the standard by twenty seconds and feels, in her chest and her legs and her burning lungs, like an enormous amount of work for a very small margin.

She bends over at the finish line with her hands on her knees and breathes.

"Not bad," says a voice beside her.

She straightens. The student next to her is a tall boy with the kind of easy physicality that suggests sport has always come naturally to him. He is grinning, not unkindly. His assessment bib reads NÚMERO 7 — FERRAN.

"You finished ahead of two of us," he says. "Including Marcos, which he is going to be upset about."

Valentina looks across the track to where Marcos — presumably — is cooling down with the posture of someone recalibrating their self-image. She feels something she hasn't felt in a long time, or rather, hasn't let herself feel: the specific, clean satisfaction of having done a hard thing and not stopped.

"Good," she says.

Ferran laughs. It is uncomplicated laughter, the kind that doesn't have an agenda, and Valentina files him under a category she is only just starting to build people who are simply what they appear to be.

She passes the full assessment.

The letter arrives the following week, printed on official letterhead, addressed to Valentina Serra, second-year student, Faculty of Business and Economics. Accepted into the University ROTC Reserve Programme, commencing January.

She reads it twice at her kitchen table, alone, with the morning light coming through the window at the angle that makes everything look like itself.

The first door of the second life is open.