Abu Dhabi International Airport was, in Yara's immediate and firm opinion, designed specifically to overwhelm people.
It wasn't that it was unpleasant. It was actually stunning in that particular Gulf way — vast and cool and marble floored, the architecture grand and intentional, light pouring in from high windows in long golden columns. But it was enormous. And loud in ways she could feel even with her hearing aids turned down. And absolutely full of people moving with the confidence of individuals who knew precisely where they were going.
Yara did not know precisely where she was going.
She had the address of the conservatoire accommodation on her phone and a vague understanding that she needed to find either a taxi rank or a bus or some combination of both. She had two suitcases, a carry on, a tote bag, and approximately seven hours of flight fatigue sitting behind her eyes.
She found the arrivals hall and stood in it for a moment, getting her bearings.
The signs helped, mostly. She was good at navigating visually — years of reading environments rather than relying on sound had made her observant in ways most people weren't. She found the baggage reclaim, waited, collected both suitcases without incident, cleared customs, and emerged into the main terminal feeling cautiously competent.
This feeling lasted approximately four minutes.
The taxi queue was where it unravelled.
There was a man at the front of the queue — an airport official of some kind in a uniform — who was apparently coordinating the queue and directing people to vehicles and asking everyone something as they reached the front. Yara watched from three people back, trying to work out the pattern. When she got to the front he looked at her and said something she caught only partially, the tail end of it lost in the ambient noise of the terminal and the angle of his face.
She leaned in slightly. "Sorry?"
He repeated it. She caught maybe half. Something about a destination and a — she thought he said voucher but she wasn't certain.
"I'm going to —" she pulled her phone out, opened the address, held it toward him.
He glanced at it and said something else entirely, gesturing in a direction that could have meant any of three different things, then looked past her to the next person in the queue.
Yara stepped to the side. Stood there with her two suitcases and her phone and the address on the screen and absolutely no clearer idea of what she was supposed to do than she'd had thirty seconds ago. She looked in the direction he'd gestured. There were several signs. None of them seemed immediately relevant.
She was debating her next move when she heard — felt, really, the vibration of it — a voice beside her.
"He told you to go to zone four. The pre-booked taxi lane. Which, to be fair, is not obvious at all because the sign for it is behind a pillar for some reason that I genuinely cannot explain and I've been coming to this airport my whole life."
Yara turned.
The girl standing next to her was about her age, maybe a year younger, with the kind of face that looked like it was perpetually on the verge of saying something dry. She was Emirati, dressed in a tailored black abaya with subtle embroidery at the cuffs, hair dark and loose, one earbud in and one out, a single large suitcase beside her and a tote bag on her shoulder that said I'm fine on it in block letters with the energy of someone who was not always fine but had made peace with that.
She was looking at Yara with an expression that was not quite pity and not quite amusement. Somewhere more useful than both.
"I lip read," she added, nodding toward the official. "My cousin is deaf. Habit."
Yara blinked. Then something in her chest loosened slightly — the particular tension she carried in new places, the constant low level effort of navigating a hearing world — and she exhaled.
"Zone four," Yara said. "Behind the pillar."
"Behind the pillar," the girl confirmed. "Truly inspired signage. I'd complain but nobody would listen." She paused. "No offence."
"Some taken," Yara said. "But only a little."
The girl's mouth curved. "Where are you headed?"
Yara showed her the phone. The Zayed Conservatoire address.
Something shifted in the girl's expression — surprise, then something warmer.
She held up her own phone. The same address.
They looked at each other for a moment.
"Noor," the girl said, switching her tote to the other shoulder and extending a hand. "Composition and production. Second year."
"Yara. Composition." She shook it. "First year. Obviously."
"Obviously," Noor agreed, looking at Yara's two enormous suitcases with an expression of fond judgement. "You packed for a first year."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you packed everything you own." She was already moving toward the pillar and the sign that was behind it. "Come on. We can share a cab. I know which drivers are good and which ones will take you the long way round because they think you don't know the city."
"Do you know the city?"
"I grew up here." Noor glanced back over her shoulder. "I know everything."
Yara grabbed the handles of both suitcases and followed her.
Noor did, in fact, know everything.
Or at least she knew enough to get them into a cab within six minutes, negotiate in rapid Arabic that made the driver nod with what appeared to be genuine respect, and settle into the back seat with the ease of someone returning to a place that had always belonged to her.
Yara sat beside her and watched Abu Dhabi begin outside the window.
It was early evening now, the sky doing something extraordinary — that particular Gulf sunset she had only ever seen in photographs, the horizon an impossible gradient of amber and rose and deep violet, the city's towers silhouetted against it like something from a painting. The road from the airport was wide and lined with palms and everything felt enormous and luminous and new.
"First time in the UAE?" Noor asked. She was looking at the window too but she'd angled herself slightly toward Yara in a way that made lip reading easy without making a production of it. Yara noticed this and appreciated it the way she appreciated anyone who did it without being asked.
"First time anywhere, really," Yara said. "Outside the UK."
"Big jump."
"Scholarship."
Noor raised an eyebrow. "International scholarship? There are fourteen of those."
"I know."
"Hm." The sound was approving in a way Noor probably hadn't intended to let out. She looked back at the window. "What do you compose?"
"Everything. Orchestral mostly. Some contemporary. I'm also —" Yara paused, the habit of a lifetime. The thing she didn't say. Then, for reasons she couldn't entirely explain — the sunset maybe, or the exhaustion, or the fact that this girl had spotted her struggling in an airport and walked over without making her feel like a problem to be solved — she finished the sentence. "I sing. As well."
Noor turned back. "Yeah?"
"Not for anyone. Just. Yes."
Noor studied her for a moment with those dark evaluating eyes and then said simply — "The conservatoire will fix the 'not for anyone' part. Just warning you."
"Is that a threat?"
"It's a forecast." She turned back to her phone. "Welcome to Abu Dhabi, Yara. Try not to be overwhelmed. The city rewards people who pay attention."
Yara looked back out the window. The city was golden now, the last of the sun caught in every tower and every pane of glass, and the cab moved through it like something being let in.
Outside, Abu Dhabi pressed itself against the windows — wide roads and date palms and the distant glitter of the corniche — and somewhere in that glittering unfamiliar sprawl, there was a conservatoire with her name already on a room. Four days ago she had been sitting in her bedroom in Notting Hill with her hearing aids out and her whole life laid out in sheet music on the walls.
She thought about that girl for a moment.