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faded Nomura Electronics signs. Between the boards, all you could see was metal. Micah pushed on a sign, and it slid open like a patio door, revealing a hole in the chain-link fence.
     
    Once inside the fence I was eyeball to eyeball with a forest of steel poles and wooden beams. My first impression was that we were under the bleachers, as if there were some secret stadium here. Turns out there was.
     
    “What is this place?” I demanded.
     
    “You’ll see it better once we get out from under the seats.”
     
    We walked along under the back row until we emerged into the open. There I saw a giant playground of steel, rope, and Plexiglas. It looked as if it had been built from those metal building sets Dad bought me when I was little and then played with all Christmas Day by himself.
     
    Micah jumped on the bleachers and bounded up to the top. “From here you can see the whole layout.”
     
    With a groan, I followed him up there. I took in the crazy quilt of structures. A log with handholds carved out of it hanging over a partially filled pond. A big fish net flapping over a dry pond. A canyon of clear walls.
     
    “It’s an obstacle course,” I concluded.
     
    “Yeah, Winter’s granddad lets me skateboard on that one.” Micah pointed to a curved wall that looked like a massive wave. It had to have been twenty feet high.
     
    “He built this whole thing years ago to practice for some goofy Japanese game show,” Micah added.
     
    “Uh, cool.” It wasn’t.
     
    “Oh, this isn’t the cool part,” Micah said, beaming. “Over there, behind the Spider Climb.” He pointed to a tower of scaffolding at the far end of the yard.
     
    “Don’t they have security?” I asked. We hadn’t needed a retina or voice scan or even a key code to get this far.
     
    Micah shrugged. “They have some sort of system on the house itself. Winter leaves the back ‘gate’ open so I can skate or hang out whenever.”
     
    As we cut across the course, I noticed that some of the obstacles were missing pieces. Some of the rope was frayed and rotting. Boards were missing.
     
    The Spider Climb turned out to be two walls of slippery Plexiglas you evidently had to climb to get to a rope, which you then had to shinny up about thirty feet to reach a buzzer on the top.
     
    Just beyond the tower there was a bamboo gate. It opened into a whole different world. I don’t know what I was expecting after the adult jungle gym we’d just passed through. Definitely not this.
     
    “This is Winter’s garden,” Micah announced as we stepped into it. And I had to admit it. This was the cool part.
     
    A bamboo wall encircled a crisscross of polished wooden paths and white sand. It was almost peaceful, like something out of a Japanese home-and-garden show. Or a martial arts movie. Almost. Except that instead of bonsai trees and big rocks planted in the sand, there were these eerie metal sculptures. And they moved. At least the first one did.
     
    Though it was just a few big twists of burnished metal, it looked like a hunched-over man pawing at a pool of water. His hands slapped at the surface of the water, sending out bigger and bigger ripples.
     
    “Watch this,” Micah whispered, pointing to the next thing in the garden. It looked like a metal shopping bag lying on its side.
     
    The water started to lap up onto the sand by the bag. Two slender black pieces of metal peeked out of the bag and felt their way to the ground. The feelers or legs crab walked themselves partially out of the bag, and the creature started to pull itself, bag and all, up the sloped walk. Its frenzied back-and-forth motion reminded me of something.
     
    “Are those windshield wipers?” I asked, thoroughly impressed—and unnerved.
     
    He nodded, a big grin on his face.
     
    Something about the jerky, almost desperate crawl of the wipers dragging the shopping bag shell behind them made me uneasy. Then as the whole thing reached the top of its little hill, it