The night I met Inoxx & The Toxx, the city was drowning in its own reflections.

I was chasing what the department called the “Epic Journey case”: people who didn’t jump, didn’t run, didn’t die — they just stepped out of their lives after looping the same anonymous track on repeat. No body, no note. Just headphones on a pillow and a playlist full of ghosts.

Every scene looked the same. A laptop still warm. A browser paused on the same profile. One track spinning in the history, over and over: instrumental, trip-hop, strings, radio static and a heartbeat that wasn’t quite human. The last victim had renamed it “Nocturne: A Night of Wonders,” like they thought it was a private joke.

The trail pulled me uphill to a mansion that shouldn’t have had lights on at 2 a.m. Inside, the air tasted like old secrets. A grand piano waited by the fireplace. On the lid: three glasses, one half-empty, like someone had drunk their courage and left.

They were already there.

A punk with a green mohawk sat at the piano, leather jacket, Union Jack on the sleeve, fingers resting on the keys. By the window, a woman in a red dress watched the city. Her blue hair caught the glow from outside. Between them stood a tall figure in a velvet suit with an old computer monitor for a head, screen humming softly.

“Rough night, detective?” the monitor crackled. “Doesn’t look much like a Summer in Paris to me. Sit.”

I didn’t remember telling them I was a detective. I sat anyway.

The punk started to play. Slow, smoky chords. The kind of music that makes good decisions feel optional. It curled around my thoughts and dug up things I’d tried to bury. Regrets. Almosts. The people I hadn’t saved.

“That’s the one from the file,” I said. My voice sounded further away than it should have.

“In one version,” the woman murmured. “Out there they give it new names. Someone called it The Bright Side of the Moon once. Someone else named it after a person they should have let go. Some write Beware of the Quiet Girl in the title and pretend it’s not about themselves.”

She finally looked at me. Her eyes were too calm, like someone who’d seen every ending and stopped being surprised by any of them.

“The music doesn’t take them,” she said. “We don’t take them. They come here on their own. We just… give their feelings somewhere to live.”

In the corner, a tape machine turned, big reels spinning in a lazy circle. The labels were handwritten: track titles, dates, initials. I recognized some from the case files. One bartender had told me, “That song, it’s like it knows what you almost did.”

Then I saw it. My own initials. Same careful handwriting. Same date as tonight.

On the monitor, the image shifted. I watched myself open the front door, step into the room, drip on the carpet. Same coat. Same tired eyes. Same bad feeling dragging behind me like a second shadow. Behind that, another version of me. And another. Each one slightly different. A word changed here, a hesitation shaved off there. A dozen takes of the same scene.

“If you’re here,” the screen said, voice dropping into the mix, “it means you pressed play again.”

Time folded in my ears. I tried to stand, but the chords held me in place. I understood, suddenly, why no one left a note. You don’t write a goodbye letter to a song. You just hit play one more time and let it do the talking.

“That’s the real Epic Journey,” the punk said quietly, not looking at me. “Not running away. Finally letting the soundtrack match what’s inside your head.”

Moonlight slid across the room, erasing the corners. For a second, the salon didn’t feel like a place at all, more like the inside of a track: loops, echoes, reverb, tiny details you only hear on the tenth listen.

“That’s how it works here,” the woman in red said. “Nobody goes missing, detective.”

She leaned back into the shadows as the tape clicked and locked into place.

“They just stay in the song.”

[ I like my music's volume high enough to not hear you. ]

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