Throttle Lever

As quickly as Karr had seen the look, it disappeared when the big, soft fellow turned his back and began to search his rows of stock. Some of the shelves had labels, and some did not. Some had notes slapped on them that declared a piece reserved, or already sold and waiting for pickup. Unkar Plutt skipped those and reached to a second shelf—climbing up on a footstool and then a ladder until he could pull down just the right object for his audience.

“Here it is. The thing I wanted to show you.”

When he stepped down again, he was holding a ship’s throttle controls—just the lever and its casing, all its wires capped off and tucked into a housing block it sat on like a presentation stand.

“What’s that?” Maize asked, eyes wide.

“It came from one of the Republic ships—a small flier that crashed somewhere after a conflict with the Separatists. Probably flown by a Jedi. When someone from off-world brought me this to trade, I knew it was special. Didn’t even realize what he had, the fool.”

“Can we touch it?” Maize was the one who asked this time.

Karr did not. His fingers didn’t want it. Nothing about the throttle lever struck him as passingly important in any sense. It took all his energy to hide his disappointment.

The merchant handed it to her with something like reverence, or perhaps fear—like it might explode if it was handled too carelessly.
Maize turned it over in her hands, poking at the buttons on the left-hand side of the lever and gently tweaking the caps on the wires. “This is actually pretty cool,” she told him. “Do you know who the ship belonged to?”

“I told you, it was a Jedi pilot,” he said, but something about his tone of disinterest said that he might not be telling the whole truth. Or any of it. “There were a handful of them, at least. More than that, perhaps—who can say? But the price is not a trick or a joke. I know what it is worth, and I will accept no less.”

“Of course not. We would not dream of haggling,” said RZ-7, before remembering he probably shouldn’t be calling attention to himself.

“Speak for yourself,” Karr told him.

Plutt harrumphed. His arm flab jiggled, and his breastplate rattled. “No negotiations! My stock is rare and priced accordingly. You can either afford it or you can’t. Don’t waste my time!”

Only then did Maize notice that Karr hadn’t yet tried to touch the throttle casing. “Karr, don’t you…don’t you want to take a look?”

“Uh, yeah. Sure. Give it here.”

He slipped off a glove, took the object in his hands and pretended to get thoughtful. He turned the item over, looking at it from every angle. From the corner of his eye, Karr could see Plutt scrutinizing him as much as he was scrutinizing the throttle. Suddenly, a low electronic chirp caught everyone’s attention. Both Karr and Maize looked to RZ-7, but the droid didn’t seem to be the source. Unkar Plutt gave a grunt of dissatisfaction and pulled a handheld communicator from his belt. He held it up to his mouth and said, “Hold on,” before turning to the kids and grumbling, “Don’t go anywhere!”

He turned toward a door that was partly hidden behind a tall metal ladder on wheels. He pushed the ladder aside and opened the door to reveal a small office, barely any larger than the cockpit of the Avadora. He wedged himself inside, leaving the door open a crack so he could keep an eye on his guests as he conducted whatever shady business he was involved in.

Maize whispered to Karr, “You must really be getting good at this. You didn’t even flinch when you touched it!”

“That’s because there’s nothing here.”

She frowned. “Nothing? Not a tingle? Not a twitch?”

“Nothing. It didn’t witness any important events. I doubt it was even used by the Republic. Actually, nothing in this storeroom looks like anything that would help us. Let’s go back to the junkyard. I want to look around there, instead.”


- Force Collector, Chapter 9