For the seventh dusk in a row, the human girl comes to our tree with an offering. She approaches on all fours, moving almost as clumsily as I do when I crawl from the knothole and amble out along my favorite branch.

Her face is hidden by a ceremonial mask. It’s a simple wooden thing, not half so ornate as the ones I know humans fashioned in the time of our ancestors—but the resemblance is clear: the tall flaring ears, the elaborate ridges and ripples of a nose.

“Again?” The squealing question prickles my fur a moment before my mother alights, hooking her claws to the branch and swinging down to join me. “She’s stubborn, this one.”

The human chants her prayer, begging for the impossible, then rises up on her toes and feels for a crack in the bark of the tree. She’s wise enough to wedge her offering of honeycomb there instead of leaving it on the perilous forest floor.

“She asks for Noc’s Gift,” I explain. “She wants to craft echoes.”

“You understand me,” the girl calls up at us. “My grandmother told me so. Stop ignoring me.”

Mother gives a chitter of laughter; I stay silent.

“I know you can help me, too.” The girl’s voice, so slow and low compared to ours, has a strange tremor to it. “She said in the old days, if someone really believed, if someone made the right sacrifices, you would bless them with the sound-sight.”

I turn to Mother. “Is it true?” I ask.

“It’s true.” Mother cocks her head. “But those were the old days. Back when there were proper temples, back when priests made offerings every night and hunters scoured the owls from our woods.”

She did not mean to say owls; I can tell from the way her head twitches, as if she can bite the word back inside her mouth. The word owls makes her remember the night that is only a dark blur to me, the night a pale monster struck me out of the sky and tore my left wing into fluttering shreds.

“You must be hungry, love,” Mother says. She turns to track a ghost-moth as it loops past, painting the air with quicksilver waves. “I’ll bring you that fat one.” She pauses. “Forget the human. They’ve forgotten us.”

“Not all of them,” I say, knowing she will bring me the moth as an apology and knowing I must pretend it isn’t. “This girl knows all the prayers.”

Mother stretches both her beautiful wings. “Only words, love. I’ll be back in a moment.”

“I know you’re there,” the human calls, voice higher and quicker now. “I can hear you talking. Please. Please ask Noc to help me.”

“She has the whole day to see,” Mother snarls, angry at the human because she cannot be angry at the owl. “What does she need the night for?”

She drops away, joining the tumult of hunters seeking their first meal of the evening. Watching the effortless snap and billow of her wings makes my own ache. She’ll be back to feed me, and so will others, all sisters and cousins strong enough to hunt more than they need.

But for now I am alone with the human, who makes a noise I have not heard before: choked, wet, strong enough to shake her enormous body. Then she wails, almost how the fox or coyote wails. In some strange way, it’s familiar.

It sounds the way I feel when I remember winter’s approach, when I remember the cold will force all my sisters and cousins and even my mother to migrate south. When I remember I will stay here, and I will die.

The girl pulls off her mask. Suddenly the way she stumbles to the tree, the way she runs her hands so carefully along its bark, gains new meaning. Her eyes are gouged from their sockets. The twin slashes of scar tissue, rippled and glistening, make me feel the owl’s talons all over again.

But the wounds are more precise than mine, more deliberate, and I have seen humans craft tools sharper than any tooth or claw. A thought turns my stomach cold and hollow: This was done to her by her own kind.

I understand now why she begs for Noc’s Gift. She has no daylight, nor does she have any way to navigate the night. Someone has put her permanently into the dark.

“I nearly caught it.” Mother is back, clutching a pudgy larva instead of the ghost-moth. “That greedy pup, Chemesh, he swooped in right over my shoulder.”

The wriggle of the larva makes my mouth water, but there’s something I need to ask her first.

“In the old days, when we did help the humans—” I pause, watching as the girl dons her mask and stumbles slowly away. “How did it work? How did Noc teach them the echo craft?”

Mother blinks at me. “A bat must intercede,” she says. “To give Noc’s Gift to a human, the bat must surrender it themselves, and live only by their eyes.”

I have eyes.

• • • •

I miss the world of quicksilver echoes, of sounds that dance and shapeshift in the night, but I am learning to trust my eyes and my human. She moves deftly through the forest now, day or night, singing from her mouth and nose like a true child of Noc.

That first night she found me at the base of the tree, the night I said my goodbyes to Mother and the flurry of siblings testing their wings for the long flight south, she carried me to her stone roost in her arms. She fed me the honeycomb and tried to catch me midges. For a few perfect hours, as the echo craft left me and grew in her, we spoke of pain and how to survive it.

Now we understand each other very well. Now I ride gripping her shoulder, and I like it nearly as much as my old branch.