A/N: Hello everyone, I'm back with a new chapter here on this eve of Mando no 3.

But before you go and enjoy the chapter, I'm afraid I have a confession to make … this is hard for me to say, but I simply have to clear the air. It has come to my attention that through this fic I've erroneously used voice modulator when describing Din's voice coming through his helmet? When it is actually vocabulator or vocoder. This is of course an inexcusable blunder and I hope—nay pray—that in time you will come to forgive me.

With that out of the way, enjoy!

Chapter 29 - Legend of the Lost

Sinead opened her eyes and regretted it immediately. The cave was filled with sunlight that seared into her brain, which already felt like it had been dragged across a gravel path. Her lungs were tight, making it difficult to breathe. She let out a pathetic groan and pulled the blanket over her head.

One after one, the memories from the day before slotted into place. There had been something in the air … she furrowed her brows and forced herself to breathe slowly despite the discomfort. Mando had found her and dragged her to safety.

She placed a hand on her sternum. It suddenly dawned on her that she was wrapped in Mando's cloak. It smelled unmistakably of him, like metal and blaster fire. Unconsciously, she breathed a little deeper.

"Sinead?"

She pulled the cloak from her head. Mando stood at the opening of the cave, turning a round object over and over in his hands.

She sat up with a grunt, wincing as her whole body protested against ... everything. She had slept on the cold, hard ground before but it was the first time it had left her feeling like she'd taken a tumble down a flight of stairs. "I'm up."

"How're you feeling?"

"Like I just went three rounds against a mudhorn."

"Mhm. You should eat something." He gestured to a ration bar lying beside the now extinguished fire, and Sinead made a big show of picking it up and shoving it into her mouth. It had the taste and consistency of old rubber but it did make her feel a bit better.

When she was done eating, Mando handed her a flight helmet that had seen better days; the red paint that covered the plastoid was chipped and scarred and a small crack ran down the visor. "Where did you find this?"

"There's a crashed ship down the mountain," Mando said. "It's air-tight, I checked."

"Great. Not really itching to get poisoned again. Once was more than enough." It ended on a croak and Sinead cleared her throat. Her lungs spasmed, sending her into a coughing fit that shot pain through her chest.

Two hands on her shoulders kept her from keeling over, and she was vaguely aware of Mando saying her name. When the coughing fit ceased, she looked at Mando through watery eyes. "M' okay."

"We're going back to the village." Mando's voice was strained. "They can deal with this." His left thumb rubbed soothing circles into her shoulder.

Sinead sucked in a breath. "No, really, I'm okay." It wasn't a lie. It felt like the coughing fit had removed whatever it was that had restricted her lungs. "We've come too far to turn back, besides we need fuel to get off the planet."

Mando suddenly became aware that he was still touching her and his hands fell from her shoulders. He stood abruptly and stepped back to the cave's opening, giving her some air.

She schooled her face into a neutral expression while she got to her feet. The cave spun and she swallowed, fixing her gaze on a patch of moss growing on the rocky wall. Her stomach flipped once before she found equilibrium.

Wordlessly, Mando handed her a canteen and she drank until it was empty. The cold water cleared her head, and when she bent down to retrieve the cloak, she almost felt like before.

She handed the cloak back to Mando. "Thank you for this, and for ... yesterday. Couldn't have been easy getting out of there." She pushed down the image of Kyen, dead and cold.

Mando cleared his throat. "Yeah." He turned his head towards the mouth of the cave. "If you're really sure you want to go on, we should get moving. I don't want to spend another night out here."

She looked out at the gently swaying trees just outside the cave. Somewhere on the other side of the valley the kid was waiting for them. "Yeah, just give me a second."

A few meters from the cave there was an ancient fallen tree. The rotten wood dipped when she sat and started to pick at her dirty braid. Most of the hair had escaped during her adventure in the woods, and underway she untangled dead leaves, clumps of dirt, a beetle.

"Your hair is too long."

Sinead glanced up at Mando, squinting against the violently blue sky. She was halfway done with braiding her hair around her head to make it fit inside the helmet. "Excuse me for not taking hair advice from someone who always wears a helmet. For all I know you could be bald under there."

He didn't seem perturbed leaning against the side of the cave entrance. "It's too easy to grab in a fight."

"Well I like my hair no matter how grabbable it is."

His shoulder lifted in a half-shrug. "Suit yourself."

Once she finished she slipped the helmet over her head. It let out a whir as the vacuum seal closed around her neck. The vivid green of the forest was muted through the visor but it beat getting a face full of poison. Her head felt strangely heavy, the sound of her breathing amplified in the small space.

"Does it fit?"

"I'll get used to it. Where did you say you found it again?"

"Down the mountain there's a ship. It's been here for a while, I almost missed it."

"You think that could be responsible for the toxins?"

"Don't think so. It's overgrown, it has been here for too long."

"I guess we just have to go and look around," Sinead looked up at the tree crown where slivers of blue sky were visible.

"If you start feeling anything off, we head back. Don't take any chances."

Despite the mild weather, a chill went up Sinead's spine. "Don't worry. If I see any ghostly figures you'll be the first to know." She stood and was about to brush her pants for any errant moss or bark when she froze. Her hand hovered over the spot where the whip should have been.

What happened yesterday? She tried to think back but panic made her brain reel. She'd seen the ghosts, specters, figments of her drugged mind. They'd come closer and she had pulled out the whip. She must have dropped it in the forest.

Somehow she'd managed to lose a priceless Mandalorian artifact—one of its kind—and it would take months, years to find it again.

"Here."

She looked up. Mando was holding out the whip in front of her.

She took it in numb hands. The metal felt sun-warmed and as always lighter than it should have been. "I thought I lost it." Relief made her voice wobbly and she cleared her throat. I can't believe I … thank you."

Mando shrugged one broad shoulder. "Don't mention it. We have to go now. If we lose the light before we find the cause, we will go back." His voice brokered no argument and Sinead didn't want to spend another night out here even if her life depended on it, so she just gave him a nod.

The trek down the mountain didn't take long. The forest was not as dense here and they followed an animal track until the ground evened out and they were back in the valley. Sinead scanned the dark trees. It felt like she was watching everything through a screen, the sounds and smells dulled by the helmet. Was this how Mando felt? Separated from the world by a layer of beskar, never really being able to touch, feel.

The forest was barely any brighter in the daylight, the leaves twisted to catch the sunshine, casting the ground in shadows. There were no movements. No eyes in the trees, no specters appearing out of the mist. No Kyen.

It was strange walking through the forest again. It felt so far removed from the dark labyrinth from the night before. She almost expected to see translucent shapes reach out, and she tried to suppress a shudder.

"See anything?" Mando said.

"Ghosts or their cause?"

"Both."

"Nothing yet. I'll keep you posted."

By the time they found the facility, Sinead barely noticed her lungs hurting anymore.

In a hollow in the ground, close to the center of the valley, sat a collection of large square buildings looking like they'd been poured directly from a cement mixer, and surrounded by a tall fence. The forest had started to reclaim the buildings, trees and shrubs growing through the fence and shooting through the concrete paths going from building to building. They were bare, without windows, except the biggest one that stood in the center. A large hexagon separated into six parts had been painted on the side. The sight sparked a long forgotten memory.

"I've seen that before," she said and pointed to the symbol. "A mechanic who worked on my parents' cargo ship for a little while. He had that tattooed on his shoulder. Said he worked in a shipyard on Antar 4." She had loved listening to his stories about fighting against the oppressors. It had sounded like a fairy tale. "Most of the Separatists were either killed or joined the Empire years ago."

"It's probably a holdout from the war," Mando said. "If they were trying to make some kind of biological weapon."

"And what? The Lost decided that now was the time to test it?"

Mando shrugged. "Let's go down and take a look."

The buildings were a lot bigger than Sinead first thought. Not tall but just ... large. They took up too much space until it felt like she was looking at a realistic hologram instead of the real thing. They didn't fit out here in the old forest. Like a grey wound in a sea of green.

It didn't take long to find a place where the fence had been pushed down by the foliage, and they climbed across and into the silent hollow.

A commando droid lay slumped against one of the buildings, weeds growing through holes in its chassis. Sinead stopped. "How long do you think it's been there?"

"I don't know. A long time. Keep your eyes out for more."

The unnatural silence of the forest seemed magnified between the concrete walls, bouncing back and forth until the air was thick with the absence of sound.

"Do you see any doors?" She circled a smaller building and found the pockmarked concrete without even a window to squeeze through. "They must be connected through a tunnel underground. Fewer entrances to guard, I suppose." Not that it saved them in the long run.

"Over here!" Mando shouted, and Sinead rounded the corner to find him standing in front of a blast door set into the biggest building. There were more broken droids here in a half circle around the door and faded scorch marks on the concrete wall. No one had bothered picking them up when they fell.

Mando examined the wall all around the door while Sinead ran her fingers across the control panel which required a code, but even if they'd known it, there was a blaster hole right through the keypad. Whatever was in there the Separatists didn't want to risk anyone finding it.

"Depending on how thick the wall is," Mando said, "a couple of blast charges could knock the door loose, but it'll make a lot of noise."

"I doubt these guys'll mind." Sinead gestured to the broken droids around them.

"Mhm." Mando rolled his shoulders in irritation. "It'll be safer going in quiet."

"I don't think anyone's home after 20 years."

"That's not what I'm worried about. The entire building could fall on our heads."

Sinead jabbed the one remaining button on the keypad; predictably, nothing happened. "Do we have another option if we wanna get inside."

With a sigh, Mando pulled out two thermal detonators and attached them to the wall close to the door, while Sinead picked her way across the battlefield out of the radius of the blast. Mando followed, stomping through the broken droids. Once they were both a safe distance away, he activated the detonators. The boom tore through the silence, the explosion itself leaving a burning white scar across Sinead's vision. She felt the blast deep in her bones, even though the helmet protected her from the worst of it.

The smoke cleared and revealed the door still stood although there were deep cracks in the concrete wall. A large piece broke off and clattered to the ground. Sinead adjusted the helmet. "Well, it's still standing."

"I think we can push it over. C'mon."

The blast had caught a droid and ripped it from its weedy grave, laying its blaster-riddled body bare for them to see. It still clutched a powerful blaster rifle in its rusty hands. Sinead prodded it with the tip of her boot. "You know, I'm glad we missed this particular party."

Mando didn't reply or look at the droid; he went back to the door and rammed against it with his shoulder. "Help me with this."

They pushed against the door until the wall was crumbling and pieces of concrete pinged off her helmet. With one final shove, the door fell and landed on the ground with a crash that rivaled the explosion. Clouds of dust whirled into the air, illuminated by the sunlight that streamed into the room for the first time in years. There was a set of stairs in the middle of the room, disappearing down into the dark.

"If anyone's down there they've definitely heard us by now."

"If anyone's down there they probably already know we're here." He scanned the quiet buildings. "This place is too secure not to have security cams."

"Oh, that's …" A shiver went down Sinead's spine. "I didn't think of that." She'd had enough of hidden eyes watching her.

Mando made his way across the uneven door, concrete rubble crunching under his feet, and shone a light down into the darkness. Something glittered in the air.

A thick layer of dust stifled their footsteps and the air smelled stale even through the helmet's atmospheric processor. There was something besides dust that hung in the air, clinging to Sinead's exposed hands.

"I don't think anyone's been down here for a long time," Sinead said.

"Somebody released the toxin."

"What are the chances that there's another top secret facility hidden somewhere in the forest?"

"Small."

The beam of light revealed that they had reached the bottom of the staircase and found themselves in front of another blast door with black scorch marks and an intact keypad. A droid lay crumbled on the floor and Mando kicked it aside.

"It's too risky setting off another explosion down here." He gave the door an experimental push. "We'll get buried alive."

Sinead ran a hand over the keypad, pressing a random number. A little red light turned on. "Well, there's still power. If we get the code somehow …"

Mando made a sound and the light disappeared as he inspected the wall around the blast door, leaving Sinead in near darkness. She pursed her lips and looked down when her eyes fell on the dark outline of the droid. She crouched down. "Hey, Mando, can you give me some light?"

Mando turned and the droid was illuminated; it was long-limbed and sleek-looking and fortunately just as lifeless as its mates getting reclaimed by the forest.

"I think I've seen one of these before. A cargo runner my parents did business with who had one of these reprogrammed. It's a commando droid," Sinead said.

"Mhm," Mando said in a tone of voice that suggested the less he knew about it the better. She tried shooting him an apologetic look, but the light source on his helmet made him hard to see.

"What are you doing?"

She had found the droid's wrist and prodded around with her fingertips, tongue held between her teeth. "I'm trying to get to this—" A small metal rod extended from its wrist—" scomp link." After wiggling it back and forth it broke away with a clang. "Keep the light on the keypad, please."

"Does it even still work?" Mando's voice was full of doubt but he still obliged, stepping back and craned his head to illuminate the keypad.

"It should," Sinead said, slipping the scomp into the port, slowly turning it between her fingers. "Unless there's a sort of ... life-check built into the system to make sure that the droid is online. But why should there be?"

"So this exact thing doesn't happen."

"Shush now." She closed her eyes to concentrate, feeling the metal warming up in her hands, waiting for the mechanism to catch. She could feel Mando behind her, impatient and skeptical.

She felt more than heard a click. The door slid open with a grating whine and a cloud of mist rolled into the decontamination chamber. Sinead's breath hitched and she reflectively lifted her hand to slap it across her mouth, but her fingers bumped against the helmet. She held her breath as the mist pressed against the vizor, eyes wide, looking for even a glimpse of a white translucent specter.

"How're you feeling? Is the helmet holding up?" Mando's voice sounded anxious beside her.

"Yeah, I think so. We'd know by now, wouldn't we?" She lifted a hand and watched as the mist swirled in the current. If she looked closely she could see it was made by particles small enough to be carried in the air.

"This is what I saw in the forest ... something must have happened down here."

Sinead swallowed and lowered her hand. "Let's find out what."

The mist swirled when they entered the chamber.

Red warning lights blinked out a constant rhythm, making the shadows move and twist, but thankfully there was no blaring alarm. The facility was eerily silent just like the forest, and the slowly moving mist made everything seem unreal; their entrance had disturbed it, but even on the opposite side of the room the mist seemed to move by its own accord, rising or falling in an indecipherable pattern. The room itself was in disarray with signs of fighting, datapads and flimsi strewn across the floor. A broken phosphotube dangled from the ceiling by a single cord.

An open door led into a red-lit corridor that branched off into smaller rooms filled with barely visible lab equipment. The toxin was everywhere, billowing silently across the floor in great big plumes, sometimes so thickly that Sinead had to squint to see Mando beside her. She could feel his presence though, brushing up against her side.

"Do you think anyone could survive down here?" She asked.

"No." Mando touched her shoulder. "Look."

Something white was lying across the corridor floor, and Sinead's heart seized for one terrifying moment, hand flying to the vacuum seal around her neck but it still seemed to be holding tight. Whatever it was, it wasn't one of the Lost.

The mist cleared a little and they both stopped in their tracks.

"Is that a-"

"Stormtrooper." Mando bent down to get a better look at the body; the helmet was gone revealing leathery skin pulled tight over the skull but the white plastoid plates were unmistakable. The warm dry air had mummified him. His face seemed to move in the blinking red light, empty eye-sockets suddenly staring straight into Sinead's eyes. "I don't see any wounds. He must've lost his helmet."

Sinead swallowed and doublechecked the seal on her own helmet. "At least there are two blast doors between the toxin and the outside world."

Mando got to his feet with a grunt. "One door. We broke one, remember?"

"Let's hope one is enough."

The corridor ended in another blast door that had closed on a hapless droid. Mist billowed out of the resulting gap, obscuring the wall and Sinead had to fumble her way to the control panel. When the door slid open it was like being submerged in murky water.

They moved into the room beyond. Strange contraptions appeared from the mist like icebergs, machines with tubes running from the ceiling, tables strewn with beakers filled with mystery liquids. The battle had reached this room too; two Stormtroopers lay dead on the floor with blaster holes in their chest, and there were even more broken droids. On one desk, a beaker had tipped over and the contents had melted a deep hole all the way down to the floor. Another one stood precariously close to the edge. Somehow it hadn't evaporated in however many years since the lab was abandoned.

Sinead stopped in front of a large container where one of the purple flowers was suspended in transparent liquid, fed by four different tubes coming down from the ceiling.

"Sinead," Mando said, and she turned to see him standing by the far wall. The mist had dispersed enough to see a giant window with a large crack running down the middle. The chamber behind was massive, circular with a catwalk running all the way around the edge. In the center stood four large vats, two of which were filled with poison, the other two were nothing more than warped metal. It looked like they had been caught in some kind of explosion. The same blast had ripped part of the catwalk from the wall. That answered the question of why the facility was full of toxins.

"Hey, look ..." She had reached a control panel at the center of the room. A corpse lay slumped over a console. At first she thought they had died like the Stormtrooper and that the air had mummified them, but as she looked closer she saw a breathing mask affixed over their mouth and nose, and there was a charred hole in their back, probably from a blaster round. They were human, or near-human, but death had erased all other identifiers?

Sinead was about to turn away when she spotted something under the corpse. She took a stabilizing breath before grabbing their shoulder. The skin beneath the grey shirt was at once firm and unpleasantly pliant, and the corpse slid off the console with a leathery whisper, revealing a screen.

"Trial event set to ten thousand three hundred seventy-one days," she read aloud as Mando joined her."Countdown ... zero."

"Can you stop it?"

"Hmm ... maybe. If we can reset it somehow that'll still give us ten thousand odd days to figure out a more permanent solution. Wish Jami was here." She chewed on her lower lip and examined the control panel, finding two similar levers on opposite ends just out of reach. "Let's try this one. We have to turn the levers at the same time."

Mando took up station and waited for her count.

"Alright." Sinead grabbed the lever. "On three. One. Two. Three!" They yanked down on the levers and the machine gave a short, high-pitched beep before the screen scrubbed itself clean and the countdown reverted back to 10.371.

"Do you think it worked?" She asked after a couple of seconds of silence. "This seems a little too ... easy."

"You think this was easy? You got poisoned! You could've died." Mando shot her a look that endeavored to be exasperated even through his helmet and the mist.

"You know what I mean. An entire village fled to the mountains and all we had to do was press a couple of buttons." Her hand bumped against her helmet as she tried to push a lock of sweaty hair out of her eyes. "Why do you think they set the trial so far out in the future?"

Mando shrugged. "Could be an accident when the facility was attacked. It doesn't matter now."

"I guess it doesn't." She glanced around the darkened lab at the machinery that took on strange shapes half obscured by the mist. "Let's head back to the villagers. Who knows how long we've been down here." Without natural light it was hard to tell.

"We've already wasted too much time here. We should've been on the way to Celvalara by now." Mando took a step back and nearly disappeared in the mist.

An image of Kyen, cold and dead, flashed across her mind. "Yeah." The dark lab, not exactly the most hospitable place in the first place, grew even more foreboding. She rested a clammy hand on the grip of her blaster.

Small pinpricks of light shone through the mist from the various machines still somehow functional after all those years.

The lights moved.

"What the—" a metal hand shot out of the mist and closed around her arm. Before Sinead had time to react, she slammed into a table, sending datapads and beakers crashing to the floor.

She ducked under a whirling metal arm that had enough force behind it to crush her skull, helmet and all, and slid off the table.

A commando droid advanced on her. Its oval face made it uncomfortably humanoid and it moved in a way that was both too fluid for a droid but too deliberate for there to be anything else but wires and silicon behind it.

It lunged and Sinead scrambled out of its way at the last second. She danced backward, keeping it in her line of sight, barely noticing when she hit a large machine.

She caught a glimpse of Mando through the wildly swirling mist, heard the sound of fighting, metal on metal. Just how many droids were down here?

The commando droid sprang for her and Sinead tried dodging but that split-second distraction proved to be too long. Its metal fingers scraped across her helmet sounding like a thunderclap, nearly enough to drown out the pounding in her ears.

The commando droid grabbed her around her neck, but she didn't even have time to panic before her feet left the ground and she was hurled over a table, crashing to the ground. A rack of vials fell and showered her in glass shards. At least these were empty and not like—

An idea struck her just as the commando droid vaulted the table in one leap. She rolled out of the way, hearing glass crunching as it landed.

Where was the entrance to the lab? The place was hard to navigate when all she had to worry about was the mist and now she had a murderous droid on her heels.

She sprinted down the length of the laboratory, somehow hearing the slight whirr of the droid following. Mando was close by but she didn't have the wherewithal to find him in the murk.

Something struck her in the middle of the back and sent her sprawling into a table, where a beaker wobbled dangerously close to the edge. She didn't think, her hand wrapped around cold glass and hurled it at the advancing droid.

The glass smashed against the droid's head which started to cave in on itself with an impossible sizzling sound like meat hitting a hot pan. No, not caving, but melting away as the acid burned through layers of metal like it was flimsi. Its body tumbled to the floor with a crash.

Had she breathed since the droid first grabbed her? It didn't feel like it. Her knees buckled and she had to grab the edge of the table to stay upright.

There was a sound of screaming metal. She looked up from the smoking remains of the droid and saw Mando standing, breathing hard. A headless commando droid lay crumpled at his feet, its head still spinning on the floor beside it.

"Are-" Sinead sucked in a deep breath. "Are you okay?"

"Yes," he said, looking down at the droid. "Security."

She winced as she rolled her shoulders. Now that the adrenaline was ebbing she felt every time the droid had hurled her across the room. "They didn't do a great job clearing out the place."

Mando kicked the headless droid out of the way with an angry grunt. "No they—SINEAD!"

Something hard crashed into her. She was pinned to the floor, hands clawing ineffectively against metal. Two round eyes stared down at her. It lifted a clenched fist.

Then her lungs caught fire.

And the world went dark.