Kintara is a river city that prefers ledgers to speeches. When the time‑visa program threatens to turn history into content, caseworker Amaya and reluctant witness Jonah agree to a tidy lie—a fake marriage—to stand where it counts and keep the rules honest. Their first clean crossing sparks a civic movement: Noon is a rope, not a watch; tariffs can be clerical—benches and tea—rather than years carved out of people. But a black‑market warehouse called The Athanor is laundering stolen memory into addictive "composites," and a suave Archivist swears it's mercy.

With a team of clipboard paladins and code poets, Amaya and Jonah seize a room, write a treaty, and teach a city to prefer records over posters. Along the way they draft a private Covenant of Verbs. When the Rope Year arrives, ferries whistle two‑long, one‑short and wait for rope before answering. Second Chances is civic science fiction with a heartbeat: cozy‑adjacent, slow‑burn, and fiercely hopeful about the paperwork that keeps people alive.