An outcast rat, Romulus, who has wing-like growths on his back, sees similarities between himself and the bats and helps them escape. The pair escape into a grate, where a gang of rats captures them. After Shade and Marina’s departure, Goth and Throbb find the abandoned house and feast on all of the bats inside, donning their bands like trophies. The bats invite Marina to stay, but she ultimately decides to continue on with Shade. The bats believe their bands will turn them human, and their leader demonstrates how he can split his skin to prove he is beginning this transformation. As they flee, they encounter an abandoned house full of bats who have bands like Marina. Part 3 finds Shade and Marina flying fast through the winter to stay away from Goth and Throbb. Shade and Marina eventually learn his secret and escape. Goth pretends to be nice to the smaller bats, but secretly he’s plotting to make Shade and his colony into slaves for food. He tells Shade that Shade’s long-thought-dead father, Cassiel, is actually alive, and he warns the pair to avoid bats with metal on their wings.

He uses berries and plants to heal Shade’s wounds and reveals that he can see the future. The bat who guards the gargoyles on the cathedral roof is an albino bat named Zephyr. Pigeons, too, are against the bats, and Marina and Shade flee some pigeons and meet another bat at the top of a cathedral. This sparks a war because the owls blame the bats in general for killing their allies. They embark on a murderous rampage, eating any small animal or bird in sight. In Part 2, Goth and Throbb, two large cannibalistic bats from the jungle, escape their human enclosure. Along the way, Shade gets separated from his colony and meets Marina, and Brightwing bat who was banished from her colony because humans placed a band on her. The owls burn down the colony’s main roost, which forces the colony to leave for their hibernation roost early. The owls demand Shade’s murder as payment for breaking this law, but Frieda, the colony’s elder, refuses to surrender him. In Part 1, Shade defies the laws put in place by owls and stays up to see the sunrise.

The novel is divided into three parts, and it shifts point of view between Shade, a runt newborn Silverwing bat, and Goth, a cannibalistic bat from the jungle.

Silverwing by Kenneth Oppel