... Jean Grey's Newest Enemy ...

Jean Grey's Newest Enemy Is Also Her Most Powerful - And Personal by Renaldo Matadeen –  in CBR Exclusives

X-Men Red has been pivotal in detailing Jean Grey's adjustment to being alive once again following her return in the Phoenix Resurrection miniseries. Her main task as the new mutant messiah is to safeguard her species while achieving peace with mankind; a dream identical to that of her former mentor, Charles Xavier.

However, she meets resistance (as expected) in the form of another powerful psychic, Cassandra Nova -- who happens to be Professor Xavier's evil twin sister. Cassandra's intent is to commit mutant genocide and thus ruin her brother's legacy, with the added goal of making sure Jean feels responsible for the extinction of her people along the way.

As Cassandra gathers her arsenal, X-Men Red Annual #1 reveals she's lined up an extremely powerful rival to be Jean's enemy in the form of the X-Men leader's daughter from an alternate timeline, Rachel Grey.

Rachel, aka Prestige, has been established as a member of Kitty Pryde's X-Men Gold team over the past year or so, which makes her appearance here all the more surprising. However, it turns out she's been a sleeper agent all along, as revealed in a flashback to the aftermath of Jean's resurrection. The annual's entire story is a flashback, actually, showing Jean interacting with people close to her from her past life, one where she was married to Cyclops. Apart from old teammates, she reunites with Rachel (her daughter with Scott from the "Days of Future Past" storyline), whom she rightfully considers family.

Instead of a drawn-out conversation, the pair take to the skies, mentally connecting and establishing a bond of friendship and trust. This leads to Rachel accompanying her to meet Laura Kinney and Honey Badger as tribute to Wolverine, and to make amends with Black Bolt after the mutant-Inhuman war. The issue ends with Jean, now decked in her custom-made Red outfit, at Cyclops' grave, promising to make a better world.

But in the epilogue, as we revisit the end of that day Rachel spent with Jean, Prestige is seen drinking a cup of tea at the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning. There, we see Cassandra's mental projection emerge from the shadows, fiddling with Rachel's mind. Rachel, one of the institution's lecturers, can't sense her, and Cassandra reveals she's going to manipulate her against her 'mother.'

In Red, Cassandra has been using nanites called Sentinites to infect humans and mutants in order to eradicate the "children of the atom." She's also been turning world leaders against Jean's budding mutant nation, which has moved from Wakanda to an Atlantean refugee camp. This new move, though, certainly counts as a serious leveling up. Not only is there a deep-lying connection to Jean which Cassandra intends to exploit, but Rachel's psychic powers have been growing drastically recently, a development visually represented by her "Hound" marks returning from the "Days of Future Past" timeline. This gives Cassandra all the more reason to capitalize on Rachel's mutant-hunting powers.

In the past, Rachel has harbored conflicted feelings when it comes to the idea of Jean, who rejected her when the young mutant was in Excalibur and both met in another alternate reality known as the Mojoverse. It took them a while, but eventually Jean changed her caustic attitude towards Rachel, and both made peace with each other. Rachel also changed her last name from Summers to Grey when she eventually got back to the mainstream 616-Marvel universe, expressing disapproval of Cyclops' betrayal of his relationship with Jean by having an affair with Emma Frost. In short, she has a lot of emotional baggage and a slight resentment when it comes to her parents' fractured relationships across various timestreams, all of which makes her susceptible to Cassandra's mind control.

In retrospect, Cassandra may have already left her mark on Rachel; it would certainly explain why, in X-Men Gold #28, she couldn't pierce the mind of human supremacist Lydia Nance. In Gold, Nance and a sentinel A.I. called Alpha are using Colossus to begin spreading the mutant killing Legacy Virus once again, and when Rachel interrogated her, she couldn't breach Nance's psionic shields. Nance's plans would seem to aid Cassandra's ambitions, and her scene coincidentally also involves nanites, so there's a possibility her strings are being pulled by Cassandra as well. Which leaves us wondering if Xavier's twin really has been toying with Rachel and other X-Men teams all along.

Rachel's mental state is quite unstable and she's vulnerable at the moment, so whether it's as a sleeper agent or as a conduit for Cassandra to possess for an all-out psychic war against Jean, she's in obvious danger. As someone who's wielded the Phoenix Force, too, she may well be Cassandra's trump card, making it just as personal as it is business. With the Extermination event to come, Cassandra's actions are certainly poised to leave the X-Men as ill-prepared as can be, and maybe a few power-players short for the dark days ahead.