Ending Jenesis excerpt, celebrating 200 pages.

Not that 200 pages (about 60k words; I know page number means nothing) is the biggest accomplishment ever, but I've been bleeding and sweating and dying because of this stupid book these girls (Jenesis and Juno) are making me write. And I'm surprised I've even made it this far.
So here you go.

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Juno lies next to me, twice the blankets climbing around her. Every now and then I check to see if she is sleeping, but her eyes remain fixed on the sky. Glowing specks poke through the midnight-colored fabric that stretches from one side of the horizon to the other. Juno was right. Malachi was right. There are millions, scintillating and dancing to music we will never hear.

“There’s one thing,” Juno says.

I turn to her again. “What?”

She gives a shrug, like she isn’t sure how to put her thoughts into words. I know how that is. “The ocean scared me today,” she says. “I never thought something could be so alive and so dead at the same time.”

I wait for her to make sense.

“I haven’t seen any of the world at all, except in pictures. But those pictures were beautiful. I know things don’t look like that now. The ocean definitely proved that. It made me scared—it made me think we’ll never have any hope. Everything on this planet will die, including humanity, and Earth will be left to rot alone in outer space.”

I stay quiet, looking at her. It’s like she has been shopping in my mind, trying on different ideas that came straight out of my head. They sound wrong coming from her.

“But the stars are still beautiful,” she continues. “All the death in this world will never be able to tamper with their beauty, because it can’t reach them. That gives me enough hope. Even if humanity does die off completely, Earth is still part of something bigger. Something magnificent. So nothing is ever truly hopeless.”