The Glass Rain

Clara sat cross-legged on her boarding house bed, finger tracing the delicate anatomical diagram. Cornea. Lens. Vitreous humor. The eye's architecture mapped in precise India ink lines.

The world detonated.

Glass exploded inward, a thousand crystalline daggers riding the shockwave. Clara's hands flew up. Too slow. Sharp edges bit her cheek, her forehead, the soft skin beneath her jaw.

She lowered her hands. Red fingers. Red palms. The textbook lay open beside her knee, its pages now decorated with crimson droplets.

Superficial lacerations. No arterial bleeding.

The clinical assessment arrived unbidden, automatic. Her training asserting order over chaos. She pressed her apron to her face, felt the warm trickle slow.

Outside, Halifax screamed.

---

Camp Hill Hospital's triage ward smelled like carbolic acid losing a war against blood. Clara pushed through the entrance and stopped.

Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Bodies filling every cot, every chair, spilling into hallways. Most clutching their faces. Most bleeding from the eyes.

Dr. MacLennan stood in the center, spectacles reflecting surgical lamps. His hands moved in ritualistic precision—scrub, rinse, shake. Twenty seconds exactly. Some habits battlefield medicine burned into a man's bones.

"Need a system, Doctor."

Clara's breath caught. Doctor. He'd never called her that before. Always "Miss Whitmore" with barely concealed disapproval for women in medicine.

"Invent one."

The terse command hung between them. December wind howled through shattered windows, scattering patient charts across bloodstained linoleum. Somewhere down the hall, a child wailed.

Clara wiped blood from her own eyes. The world swam, then focused. Red for immediate surgery. Yellow for urgent care. Green for minor treatment. The color-coding system assembled itself in her mind with the same crystalline clarity as those anatomical diagrams.

She grabbed blank intake forms, tore them into thirds. Found colored pencils in the nurses' station—some child's abandoned art supplies. Red. Yellow. Green.

"Triage by color," she said, holding up the improvised cards. "Skip the paperwork. Save lives first."

MacLennan's pocket watch emerged. Click. He glanced at the time, nodded once, returned it to his vest. That watch had timed surgeries in blood-soaked Boer War tents. It would time this catastrophe too.

Nurse Margaret Sutherland appeared at Clara's elbow. Chin level. Shoulders back. Perfect posture even as the world collapsed around them. She opened her leather notebook with a soft creak.

"According to Protocol 7-B, we must process intake forms before initiating treatment."

Her voice carried the icy precision of someone who'd built a career on following rules. Every word enunciated. Every syllable a small act of defiance against improvisation.

Clara's gaze shifted to a small girl being carried in. Seven, maybe eight years old. Glass protruded from both eyes like terrible jewels. The child's screams cut through every other sound—raw, primal, the sound of a future being stolen.

"What would you have me do?" Clara heard her own voice break on the question. "Follow protocol or save this child?"

Margaret's pen hovered over the page. For three heartbeats, she didn't move. Her jaw worked. Muscles twitched beneath her carefully powdered cheeks.

Then she straightened a medical chart that had fallen crooked against the wall. Wrote something in her notebook with small, precise letters. Closed it with a snap.

"I'm afraid that's quite impossible."

The words dropped like stones into deep water. Final. Unyielding. Margaret turned away, spine rigid, every vertebra locked in righteous certainty.

Clara's fingers tightened on the colored triage cards. The red one crumpled slightly in her grip. Behind her, Dr. MacLennan's hands moved through their ritual scrubbing. Somewhere outside, another explosion echoed—smaller, an aftershock or perhaps ammunition stores igniting in the devastation.

The girl's screams didn't stop.

Clara moved toward her, color-coded cards fanning out in her bloodstained hands. Red for the child. Red for immediate surgery. The protocol could burn. She had eyes to save.

If her own would hold out long enough to see it done.