The looters freeze Rearden’s access to all of his accounts, trying to force him into asking for their help, but he doesn’t. His family are penniless without access to his accounts and throw themselves on his mercy by apologizing for their years of cruel treatment toward him in the hopes that this will give them leverage to control him. Rearden calls out their tactics and is entirely indifferent when Lilian tries to hurt him with the confession of her past infidelity with Jim Taggart. In a meeting with the Washington men, they try to persuade Rearden to accept a new plan that would see him running the entire nation’s steel industry at a loss, but he refuses.

Rearden returns to his steel mills and finds an armed conflict. He comes across Tony who is dying from a gunshot wound. Tony tells him that the attack on the mills was ordered by Washington to justify their taking control of Rearden’s business and that Tony was shot for refusing to betray Rearden and support the coup. He has crawled all the way from the slag heap where they dumped his body in order to find a way to warn Rearden and is satisfied for the first time in his life by having succeeded at something important.