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Lia Frei would send out a security detail to track the man down so she could delete it from her to-do list.
    “I should be going.”
    Lia stood from her perch on the table and held out her hand again. Stars, he was going to have to touch her to say goodbye. Making the briefest possible contact, he completed the handshake and stepped back from her. Getting some distance seemed like a wise idea.
    “Thank you for your help, Colan.”
    “You’re welcome, Lia—Liliane. Put on some shoes.” He left the office as quickly as possible.

Chapter 2
    “Cordon sent a message. He should arrive in forty-eight hours.” Moca tried to reassure Lia her extra duties would decrease when the assistant magistrate arrived, but she wasn’t so sure. They were standing in the residential unit hallway trying to direct two porter bots to the correct rooms, so everyone on the team would have their luggage delivered by dinner time. So far, it wasn’t going well. Welti had managed to finish off enough units for everyone, but none of the information integration was complete so the bots couldn’t navigate. This meant Lia manually oriented each load while Moca discussed and checked information on her datpad. The pile of belongings seemed as if it was never going to diminish. Moca still had four of her own large black cases in the hallway, and Lia was sure she’d already sent five back to the other woman’s suite. Maybe the bots were circling around and bringing them back out of the rooms.
    “That’s good. So his health has improved?”
    Moca rolled her eyes. As far as Lia knew, the magistrate had never experienced a health crisis. None of her physical systems would dare. Lia pushed a bot toward one of Tully’s bags and keyed in his room number on the device’s interface pad. It picked up the bag but sat there, whining metallically, until she hit the number three more times. It seemed the bots were very insecure without their direct link to the building system.
    “I suppose. He didn’t offer any information. Then again, I didn’t ask.” Moca pocketed her datpad and muscled one of the loader bots in the right direction. It trundled away, pulling a wheeled case and beeping in despair.
    The idea of the new magistrate of an entire planet acting as a luggage carrier would have been laughable a day ago, but everyone with hands-on skills was busy at work, which left the bureaucrats to do some heavy lifting. Their inauspicious arrival on Gamaliel had lowered Lia’s expectations already.
    “Is your office in good shape?”
    Lia wondered if her own barely furnished space was the norm. Not only did her office not have a door, there was enough dirt on the floor to make her nervous, thanks to the skin-crawling advice from Cit. Tor—Colan—the man who had rubbed her feet just a few hours ago. Lia’s skin prickled at the memory of that oddly inappropriate interlude. He was a strange man. He’d shown up in Tila’s backyard a few minutes after she and Welti had arrived and stood by silently as the woman bemoaned the imminent loss of three quarters of her fresh food supply. After some quick calculations of speed of construction versus harvest times, Lia worked out that most of her plants would have yielded a decent crop before the pipes and slab were going to be installed. Welti, in a fit of neighborliness, volunteered to use scrap materials to construct a greenhouse on the remaining section of backyard and would splice a vent from the new geothermal set up to heat the building. Tila had been thrilled, and Colan had been, well, slightly less grumpy.
    “My office is barren. Or bare bones. Whatever you want to call it. I’ll go with extreme minimalism.” Moca grinned as she pitched a smallish case into Zashi’s room. Lia hoped it didn’t contain explosives or weapons. There was no telling what the safety chief had brought to the surface.
    “How are things going with our unhappy liaison?”
    “Still unhappy. He did show up at two meetings