SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for New Mutants: Dead Souls #2 by Matthew Rosenberg, Adam Gorham, Michael Garland and Clayton Cowles, on sale now.

The current status quo for the New Mutants is unlike anything the X-Men have been before and sets them apart as a superhero team from the rest of Marvel’s mutants.

Only two issues in, New Mutants: Dead Souls has charted a new path for the third generation of mutants. More than that, it's done so by acknowledging and building on their history, and this week’s installment hints at a larger villain with ties to a founding member of the team.

RELATED: A Classic New Mutant Just Returned to the Marvel Universe - But Why?

Karma Police

While not part of the field team, arguably the most important character in the book — who isn’t even in this second issue — is Xi'an Coy Manh, the founding New Mutant known as Karma. A key story that serves as the foundation of Rosenberg and Gorham’s New Mutants is Marjorie Liu and Phil Noto’s run on Astonishing X-Men, where they introduced Xi’an’s half-sister Da’o who had grown resentful for being overlooked by their father and dedicated her life to improving her station and getting revenge.

Changing her name to Susan Hatchi, she established a successful munitions company and was one of the thousands of mutants who lost their powers on M-Day. Eventually, Xi’an was able to reach out to her sister and share her own struggles, bringing the two together. However, Da’o was murdered by their father just as her murdered her mother and Karma inherited the Hatchi Corporation and became billionaire overnight.

Twin Magic

Through the Hatchi Corporation, Xi’an was able to provide the New Mutants with the resources to go out on the missions they do, and while they may seem unrelated instances of the supernatural crossing over with the regular world, this week’s issue suggests that another member of the Coy Manh family is behind it all. While fighting a Frost Giant in Russia, the New Mutants discover that the man who freed the monster had no memory of doing so. The last thing he remembers was a phone call with a man named Tran, then he woke up underground with the New Mutants.

There are no coincidences in superhero comics and it’s certainly no coincidence that Xi’an has a — thought to be deceased — twin brother named Tran who has the same mind possession powers as her. Tran Coy Manh has only ever appeared in one comic, Marvel Team-Up #100, the same comic which introduced Karma to the Marvel Universe. Tran travelled to the US before the rest of his family and found employment within his uncle’s criminal organisation and when that uncle tried to strongarm Karma into working for him as well, she was forced to kill her brother in order to free Spider-Man from his possession.

KEEP READING: Marvel Celebrates New Mutants With Variant Covers

It seems that Karma might know more about the missions she’s sending her team on than she’s letting on, but there’s also a chance she doesn’t know about her brother’s return either. In order to stop him from controlling Spider-Man, Xi’an was forced to absorb her brother’s life essence into herself, where it presumably still is. What if Tran never really died and instead spent his time slowly increasing his influence and when Karma inherited a multinational arms corporation, he saw his chance to use the power to undermine his sister from within her own mind.