The Indestructibles (Book 3): The Entropy of Everything by Matthew Phillion

done some time-digging to try to figure out exactly what happened."
          "Well we know what happened. Doc never came to get me," Emily said.
          "Yes and no," Annie said. "Near as we can tell, there were two incidents that altered your future. One was, in fact, that Doc wasn't here to monitor when your powers manifested themselves."
          "Next comes the 'and' doesn't there?" Emily said.
          "Yep," Annie said. " And , the other thing that happened was that you got hit by a car."
          "I've never been hit by a car," Emily said. "Not for lack of trying. I like jaywalking. It's become kind of my sport."
          "How did your powers manifest originally, Emily?" Annie asked, smirking as if she knew the answer already.
          "I told you, I'm a fan of jaywalking," Emily said. "A car almost hit me. I bubble of floated them away. Then I bubble of floated a lot of other cars away, then problems happened, then Billy tackled me and got me out of there."
          "Yeah," Annie said. "In this timeline, that car hit you."
          "Well that doesn't sound even remotely fun," Emily said.
          "Fine," Annie said. "Let me tell you what happened."
         
    * * *
         
          Twenty years ago:
          Well, Emily thought, lying in a hospital bed with a concussion and a broken leg, maybe jaywalking is overrated.
          It happened so fast. I guess that's how you get hit by a car, she thought. If it had happened slower she could have gotten out of the way. But she'd darted out across the street, as she had a thousand times before, only this time her usual luck hadn't accompanied her. Boom. Crash. Emily street pizza.
          It could've been worse, she thought, I could've been road kill. Instead, I'm sitting here waiting for my mom to come yell at me for running into traffic again. And I can only imagine what will happen if she finds out what outfit I was wearing when I got run over.
          She never thought she'd be so happy to be dressed in a hospital johnny.
          Emily kept thinking back to the moment of the accident, though. The strangeness. She'd thrown up her arms—apparently that's what you do when you know you're about to be hit by a car, you panic and raise your arms up in front of you as if that's going to stop the car—and for a moment, a crystal clear moment, Emily was absolutely sure she could stop the oncoming car. That she could just . . . make it float away.
          But that didn't happen.
          One might deem what happened to Emily afterward floating, but at a high rate of speed, with a very sudden stop.
          There was something else, too. In the haze of the aftermath, the terrified driver trying to call 911, the police who were first to arrive on scene, the EMTs stabilizing her, somewhere in there, Emily thought, I swear I saw someone wearing a mask. A white mask, covered his face, leaving it blank. He—was it a he?—wore a dark suit and an old fedora, a red tie. Don Draper meets a pulp fiction action hero. Simply standing there, casually, content to watch Emily die.
          Except I didn't die. Rather, I broke five bones and my head has ached for the past four hours, but I'm not dead.
          And then the painkillers they'd given her finally kicked in, and Emily nodded off.
          When she woke, everything had changed.
          Her mother spoke quickly to someone just beyond Emily's line of sight. Emily propped herself up on her elbows, creaky and groggy.
          "Mom?" she said, aware that she was about to sound very whiny, and forgetting that she was probably in more trouble than she knew. Her mom had been killing her on the stop-jaywalking thing lately.
          And then Emily saw the nurse on the floor.
          Something was happening in her room.
          "Mom?" she said again, trying to shake the cobwebs out of her head. Her mother pointed at a man in a suit. Emily blinked a