She just manages to pull her punch, the muscles of her shoulder protest, but it saves her breaking her fingers on the gravel. Instead her knuckles drag against the ground, opening bloody scrapes across her hand. She lets the forward momentum carry her down onto him, her other arm angled toward his throat. If she can get her forearm flat against his windpipe, she can get back to the serious business of choking the life out of him.

She can feel blood in her mouth. She's bitten her lip, and the coppery tang is bright on her tongue. She'd felt dead since arriving here. It wasn't the memory of the knife in her gut that had convinced her this was the afterlife, it was the dullness that had plagued her. But right now? With a fight at her hands and blood on her lips? She feels alive.