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“Let’s take the shortcut, then,” you say, too curious to resist.

Zeta nods. “Follow.”

It leads you through the alley to the back of the buildings of the academic block. You haven’t wandered back here before. Back in Korolev City you don’t expect there to be anything worth finding behind a building. What you find here is the edge of the world, where the habitable strip meets the curved wall of water-filled glass, showing you a curved, distorted field of stars. You two are standing near the corner of the strip, and diagonally from here, you can see the far corner of the back end of the residential block.

The architects of the colony could have just as well included a connector between these corners, making the colony a complete loop, but for some reason chose to make it a long rectangle requiring everyone to pass through the park in between the residential and academic blocks. As it stands, the two corners are some twenty meters apart.

Zeta turns away from the edge of the world and climbs up a ladder on the side of the nearby building. Not to get left behind, you follow, still struggling just a little to pull yourself up. It leads to a low roof on a section of the building with only one floor.

“Here it is,” Zeta says, taking a few big steps back from the edge, half-steps and half-jumps, as if refining its balance and inertia in this rotational 0.3G. Without more words, it pushes itself off the wall of the taller part of the building into a full run across the roof, which in this gravity just meant a few steps to accelerate itself. Its last step lands on the corner of the roof, and it launches itself into the air.

You slide over to the corner, watching as Zeta floats over the glass wall. It turns itself around using angular motion of its arms and legs, like someone very experienced in microgravity. Its momentum from the forward jump carries it the whole way across, having overpowered its centrifugal momentum from the rotation of the cylinder. It makes an agile landing on the far corner, in the residential block.

It makes it look so easy, but you’re not confident at all in your ability to replicate this feat. It might take strength you don’t have, precision you haven’t learned, and you could easily fall hard on the solid glass or go sliding across the metal surface beyond it, and find yourself injured on the far end of the colony from the medical center. Or, it might be easier than it looks, who knows?